ITIL Asset Management

ITIL Asset Management is the core of a sound infrastructure management solution. You have to know what you own, where it is located, and how it is configured before you can measure it, service it, secure it, change it, or manage it. Lifecycle asset management processes based upon best practices are key to accurate data and accurate data is key to making proper business decisions. In today’s competitive business environment, only the strongest and most vital organizations will survive. The discipline of comprehensive ITIL Asset Management can streamline internal operations, align resources to maximize value and identify and minimize dangerous discrepancies.

ITIL Asset Management is a powerful tool that helps you make those decisions; it will assist you in managing your assets, the contracts associated with those assets, and associated costs – from cradle to grave. Throughout each phase of the asset’s life, ITIL Asset Management enables your company to realize a greater return on your investments by reducing the total cost of ownership and improving productivity. The assets that your organization invests in must fulfill their objectives, stay productive, be cost effective and provide business value. As your infrastructure becomes increasingly complex and critical to executing your enterprise business strategy, you need to effectively manage your assets. While ITIL Asset Management systems maintain details on assets above a certain value, their business unit and their location configuration management also maintains relationships between assets, which asset management does not. Some organizations start with asset management and then move on to configuration management.

The object of Configuration Management is to provide a logical model of the IT infrastructure by identifying, controlling, maintaining and verifying the version of all Configuration Items in existence.  Configuration Management is used to account for all IT assets, to provide accurate information to support other Service Management processes, to provide a sound a base for Incident, Problem, Change and Release Management, to verify records against infrastructure and to correct exceptions.

The assets that your organization invests in must fulfill their objectives, stay productive, be cost effective and provide business value. As your infrastructure becomes increasingly complex and critical to executing your enterprise business strategy, you need to effectively manage your assets. Managers who are responsible for large asset pools need to exercise strong control over the investment process in order to reduce risk. ITIL Asset Management process must be designed to produce consistent returns over time to ensure control, maximize return and minimize risk.

Asset Management (referred to as Configuration Management in ITIL) is at the core of effective help desk and service management. The quality of data within the Asset Register affects the efficiency of the entire corporate service management strategy, as all processes utilize and feed into asset management. ITIL Asset Management is more than a simple registry of physical assets; it includes documentation, service level agreements, service catalogs, warranties and knowledge. It enables the enterprise to manage the evolving relationships of those assets with customers, internal departments and locations, other organizations and external suppliers.

ITIL Asset Management enables IT to assess the current state of the IT infrastructure at any time. By providing comprehensive and up-to-date configuration details, Asset Management software provides a huge strategic advantage by empowering a business to:

• Anticipate impacts on IT services that result from a change
• Identify problem trends for an asset
• Quantify an asset failure's impact on a business
• Manage lease and maintenance costs
• Manage software license and upgrade costs.

ITIL Asset Management Suite: Asset Management Suite™ helps organizations maximize existing IT investments through active asset management by eliminating unnecessary software and hardware costs, managing contracts and entitlements, aligning service resources with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standards, and realizing asset total cost of ownership (TCO). ITIL Asset Management Suite enables your IT organization to implement a series of solutions targeted at solving immediate problems while helping you build a roadmap for the future. Asset Management Suite is segmented into a three-tiered solution. Each solution is defined by different levels of maturity. The suite levels are designed to help guide your IT organization as it matures, and align your organizational resources to industry standards and best practices