Asset Intelligence and Management

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Effective IT Governance — A roadmap to improving the business value of IT Equipment

Effective IT Governance — A roadmap to improving the business value of IT Equipment

IT assets are a major capital investment for most organizations. Effective IT governance helps ensure that these assets are properly utilized, easily accessible, and effectively tracked.

Although an IT governance platform oversees the entire IT infrastructure, proper management of IT assets is vital to the success of IT governance.

It provides structure to your organization by ensuring that your IT investments and their use supports your business goals. Effective IT governance requires robust ITAM and ITSM tools to derive accurate data which leads to improved operations.

These tools help you avoid procurement of surplus or incorrect IT assets, mismanagement of software licenses, and a variety of other IT-related issues. Furthermore, IT governance plays a significant role in regulatory compliance regarding the usage of software and hardware IT assets. This minimizes associated auditing and cyber risks and reduces overhead costs.

Resolving major business challenges with IT governance

From software licenses to infrastructure spend, to under or overused IT assets, organizations are losing millions in potential reinvestments. According to a recent study, organizations are spending an average of £2.13 million a year more than they should on software licensing due to mismanagement of software licenses.

However, with the right tools and IT governance processes in place, your organization can face these modern IT challenges head-on:

1. Software licenses challenge

The management of software licenses along with keeping track of software spending and saving is a tedious task. Not many organizations fully optimize and track their software investments.

Along with spending millions of dollars on buying and renewing licenses, they spend millions more on procuring Software-as-a-service (SaaS) products with no tools to manage them.

Without a proper IT governance framework in place, IT teams struggle to optimize their software licenses spend and usage or even identify the expired licenses, making them a target for audits.

2. Full visibility challenge

 Full visibility challenge

According to an Insight survey, £1.03 million is spent each year on cloud services and licenses purchased without proper insight. Gaining visibility over all IT assets, their locations, usage, and related operations allows IT teams to track everything and identify potential future breakdowns, non-compliance, and low threshold assets risks.

This visibility can be achieved if there is a consolidated IT infrastructure in place. A cloud-based ITAM tool coupled with effective IT service management software implements strict IT governance, hence helping you achieve visibility over the entire environment.

3. Poor IT asset lifecycle management

Managing IT assets that are in usage all the while procuring new IT assets and retiring assets that have been used to the end of their life cycles can be quite challenging.

Similarly, with Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) culture on the rise, managing these IT assets has become more complex and expensive. According to Gartner, 67% of the heavily IT-reliant organizations do not have the skills or knowledge to optimize asset lifecycle management in an effective way.

An ITAM platform will not only reinforce effective IT governance but also optimize lifecycle management and reduce costs. With custom reports on these IT assets, you will have time to plan and review changes to investments and IT asset lifecycle roadmaps so the business operations run smoothly.

Implement a strong IT governance strategy with an ITAM tool

A robust ITAM tool can help you implement a strong IT governance strategy and achieve the following key objectives:

1. Optimized use of IT assets

With IT inventory management software in place, IT governance becomes easier. As you are able to accurately track and locate your assets and monitor their use, you can reduce the unnecessary system redundancy, overhead hardware IT costs and improve the lifespan of your expensive hardware investments.

2. Reliable data

Reliable data

When an ITAM software is coupled with an ITSM tool like Zendesk or Jira, you can get real-time information on not only the status of your IT assets but also services and ongoing operations as well.

This reliable data facilitates future decision-making regarding your operations or the usage and procurement of your IT assets.

3. Increasing effectiveness

A robust platform allows you to get notifications regarding every important upcoming event — whether it is the routine maintenance tasks of servers, renewal of software licenses, or units of IT inventory reaching a low order threshold.

This way, you are always prepared beforehand, eliminating unplanned downtime and increasing effectiveness on the whole.

4. Customer Success

By integrating your ITAM tool with ticketing software, you can ensure that your clients are getting excellent services and whenever an issue comes up, you have automated processes to prioritize and resolve them accordingly.

Extending customer care with up-to-date information and quick issue resolution helps you keep your customers happy and you reach your business goals quicker.

5. Easy integration

Easy integration

IT governance works at its best when all software applications — cloud-based and on-premise integrate well with each other. When there are no siloed systems, the information is shared across all platforms and hence increases the productivity of employees.

From incident and change management to service desk and asset lifecycle management, everything works in a perfect rhythm.

Best IT governance practices

In order for IT governance strategy to consistently evolve and develop with your business direction, here are a few best practices that you should consider:

  • Ensure that there are clear, specific, and measurable KPIs regarding IT assets and operations
  • Implement strict protocols for risk management, incident management, and change management to reduce cybersecurity threats
  • Accurately track the use of your software and hardware IT assets based on both user roles and machines
  • Ensure streamlined asset discovery via a network discovery agent and unified endpoint management
  • Educate and train your employees regularly on updated policies and protocols
  • Carefully monitor the compliance standards of hardware and software asset management for both internal and external audits

Why should IT governance be everyone’s business?

The roles in your organization that will benefit from a strong IT governance strategy and technology platform extend from operational teams and maintenance departments to service delivery teams, support teams, and more.

Thanks to easily integrated components of robust ITAM and ITSM platforms, it has become easier to build a comprehensive and sustainable IT governance strategy.

When these tools and strategies are combined, they produce accurate, data-driven insights on IT assets and operations that support risk management, optimal asset utilization, agile innovation, and digital business transformation. By merging people and technology siloes, you can enable greater accessibility and reduce costs.

Read more: IT Cost Optimization: A Comprehensive Guide for Managing IT Costs in 2021

Improve your IT governance strategy with AssetSonar

AssetSonar is the leading cloud-based IT asset management software with endpoint management, software license tracking, hardware lifecycle management, and reporting capabilities to help you improve your IT governance strategy and improve the business value of your IT equipment.

Sign up today for a free 15-day trial.

For more assistance, drop us an email at support@ezo.io. You can also visit our blog for detailed support posts.

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