Reduce Time, Cost, and Risk: Integrate ITAM With Your Help Desk

Discovering and managing IT assets can be a tough job for IT teams—especially when it comes to keeping track of IT inventory.

The IT department is responsible for managing assets and liabilities as well as collecting asset data, which means keeping track of IT inventory to reduce unplanned expenditures and reduce time, cost, and risk.

IT asset management (ITAM) tools are an essential part of the asset management program and, when integrated with your help desk ticketing solution, offer a range of additional benefits, including:

• Troubleshooting
• Accelerating decision-making processes
• Logging physical locations of your organization’s assets
• Tracking warranty information and warranty claim processes
• Monitoring hardware configurations and their changes

“Asset Management involves the balancing of costs, opportunities, and risks against the desired performance of assets, to achieve the organizational objectives,” according to The Institute of Asset Management. Using a help desk solution that enable this important function can help in the following ways.

Expedite Your Company Troubleshooting

Most businesses should operate under the idea of Murphy’s Law—and plan for the worst-case scenario, which helps ensure a speedy response that minimizes both financial loss and loss of customer trust. Your ITAM solution can help expedite company troubleshooting by providing:

• Fast access to individual units
• Detailed views of individual and aggregate assets
• Searches by asset number to pull up relevant information customer service information quickly

Here’s an example of asset management in action: Say one of your firm’s computers has a part that malfunctions. With your ITAM, your organization monitors the whole computer as well as its parts: RAM, hard drive, etc. Each time a part stops working, the issue is added to a repository. A properly maintained repository provides valuable information about breakdown history, so IT is not starting from square one each time issues arise. Cataloging provides IT with the opportunity to make speedy recommendations based on past troubleshooting efforts.

Accelerate Your Decision-Making Process

Your ITAM solution can also expedite decision-making processes. IT is responsible for providing its organization with the data needed to make business decisions that will save both time and money—the most valuable commodities to any company. Your ITAM can help the enterprise make data-driven, efficient and accurate decisions. Asset management can support the business decision-making process, from budgetary concerns, and growth strategies, to technology investments and forecasting.

As an IT professional, you know that IT faces challenges every day while controlling the flow and use of data. Aggregation of these records expedites workflows and facilitates business-critical decisions. ITAM tools can track asset lifecycle data and fully integrate with finance systems and IT service desks. Centralizing asset data management reduces the risk of misinformation, and most importantly, can help reduce the incidents of unnecessary expenditures.

Using Your ITAM Tool to Track Locations, Warranties, and Hardware Configurations

A help desk tool with ITAM capabilities can make it possible to quickly and efficiently track the physical location of your company’s assets, enabling you to track the location and serial number of the equipment deployed in each department. This information can be called up instantly, whenever it is needed.

If you’re using your ITAM to inventory hardware, you can use custom fields to enter the warranty information for each computer deployed in your company’s network. This will allow you to track warranty information and even follow the warranty claims process within the tool.

“When a computer experiences a hardware failure, asset management software can help you determine whether the computer is still under warranty, “ states Brien Posey, writing for TechTarget.com. “It’s much more efficient to retrieve the warranty information from the hardware inventory than it is to go hunting for a warranty card.”

IT asset management tools work well to track hardware configurations, but configurations tend to change with the passage of time and changes in users. It’s vital to track those changes so your help desk can manage service calls effectively. Your ITAM should help you monitor changes in hardware configurations and quickly provide that data to the help desk.

Assess Other Impacts of IT Asset Management Tools on Finances

Every company has operational costs and budgets. Small and mid-sized firms can often feel constrained by these financial limitations, deciding to skip asset data management systems for spreadsheets and fragmented files. Unfortunately, this lack of organization can cost businesses in the long run. IT asset management systems aid in the identification of hidden costs, future necessities, or other expenses that might otherwise be overlooked. Removing the lags in communication and slow decision making that can cost companies money can make a difference in the firm’s bottom line.

Your ITAM tool should allow you to manage search, monitoring, and reporting for all of your company’s hardware and software assets, and offer additional versatility as mentioned above. If you’re looking for an ITAM tool to help your organization achieve its objectives and maximize your productivity, start here. Download a free trial of easy-to-use ticketing and IT asset management software for a free trial.