Overrides Blog

Asset Management

What is IT asset management (ITAM)?.

IT Asset Management (also known as ITAM) is the process of ensuring that an organization's assets are recorded, deployed, maintained, updated, and destroyed when the time comes. Simply put, it is to ensure that valuable tangible and intangible assets are tracked and used within the organization.
So what are IT assets? To put it simply, an IT asset contains the hardware, software system, or information that your organization evaluates. Some of Atlassian's IT department's most important assets are computer and software licenses that help develop, sell, and support software and the servers that host it. The useful life of IT assets is limited. You can proactively manage the life cycle of your IT assets to maximize the value your business can get from it. Each organization can define a unique phase of this life cycle, which typically includes planning, procurement, deployment, maintenance, and decommissioning. An important part of IT asset management is applying processes to all lifecycle stages to understand total cost of ownership and optimize asset utilization.

Why is IT Asset Management important?

Providing a single source of truth.

Assets are often tracked by a myriad of different people in a myriad of different locations. No single person owns things, and no single tool collects and centralizes information. Of course, confusion and inaccuracies continue. It is difficult to make informed decisions. Some companies even hire people just to track their IT assets. The system needs to do this. Without spending time and effort tracking artifacts, monitoring usage, and understanding dependencies, IT professionals can focus on what's most important to their business. Asset management brings order and provides a single source of information for IT teams, managers, and ultimately the entire organization.

Improving utilization and eliminating waste.

Asset management keeps information up-to-date so teams can eliminate waste and improve utilization. Save money by avoiding unnecessary purchases and reducing licensing and support costs. Increased control also enhances security and compliance with legal policies and reduces risk. The entire organization benefits from the positive effects on cost and productivity.

Enabling productivity without compromising reliability.

With digital transformation changing the way organizations operate, modern asset management goes far beyond tracking laptops and mice. Teams are embracing DevOps and SRE principles, and need asset management processes and tools in order to efficiently deliver new functionality and services quickly without compromising on reliability.