Published September 27, 2021

Measuring IT Asset Management Performance and Success with inMorphis

Evaluation of IT Asset Management System with inMorphis

Organizational success heavily thrives upon how it treats and manages its assets. Therefore, it is no secret that assets determine your business value. Conventional businesses need dire attention to one such asset today: Information Technology (IT). IT Asset Management has become one of the most powerful underlying processes that align your business actions and resources with long-term goals and build upon cost-effectiveness in delivering state-of-the-art services to your clients.

ITAM and how inMorphis does it differently with ServiceNow?

Software licenses and hardware assets can go astray all over the place in your organization. While you may believe you have absolute control over these assets, they remain in disguise. As a result, they are unsuspectingly excluded from essential practices, such as asset count, usage monitoring, and asset lifecycle management. It negatively impacts the tragic decision-making of the organization. Here is the point where ServiceNow can be your game-changer. It not only brings in the usual aspects of asset management software for your organization but also a well-targeted approach to bringing down your IT costs and boosting your IT service quality. It starts with grouping your assets into three categories: high-cost hardware, low-cost hardware, and software licenses. These three subsets of assets are probed to gather their most significant actionable data in nine major areas: asset location, financial data, responsibilities, general characteristics, activities, entitlements, contractual data, disposal, and depreciation.

Transforming asset information into strategic actions

The information gathered about these assets is crucial to business growth. Therefore, three vital action areas are devised with the help of this data.

1) Govern asset life cycle: Asset information helps us delve deeper into managing asset life cycles. It is ensured, starting from asset planning to its retirement. Every stage the asset goes through is made visible. It helps ensure seamless asset performance, regular maintenance, and when it becomes obsolete.
2) Regular valuation: Asset information helps determine asset depreciation and ongoing cost (residual value) based upon its date of purchase. Later, it helps in planning to decide when an asset is usable and when exactly it is ready for disposal from a cost standpoint. The regular and timely evaluation of assets is fundamental to ascertaining cost optimization and financial management.
3) Best utilize asset inventory: This activity is paramount for emphasis on IT service quality. Whether expensive or low-cost hardware or a software license – Leveraging asset information for flawless inventorying makes it convenient for the asset allocator to quickly verify the requested asset's availability. If available, the asset is systematically allocated. If not, the allocator can search for an alternate asset and decide whether the alternative is more eligible or usable than the requested one. This entire process enables smooth and error-free allocation of assets. In addition, the system can also create purchase requests in ServiceNow for assets to be bought.

The ITAM process with the Now Platform

1) It begins with discovering and resurfacing your business’s current inventory of assets. ServiceNow does it best with the help of three options. One, with a powerful ‘Discovery’ tool. Two, with ‘Help the Help Desk,' an indigenous WMI-based discovery tool that scans the PCs for all installed software packages. Three, with your business’s pre-installed discovery tool (if any) through providing integration with it through web service.

2) Updating Configuration Management Database (CMDB) with up-to-date information and discarding unnecessary and obsolete data.

3) Compile assets into categories, such as computers, servers, printers, and software.

4) Create asset management software models, such as categorizing various versions and configurations of an asset.

5) Group individual assets into hardware, consumables, and software license subsets.

6) Inventorying of assets by keeping its count of licenses in stock, allocated, and unallocated.

Read More: Why You Need ServiceNow SAM Solutions for Your Company?

Assessing ITAM Success: Key Performance Metrics

It is rightly said what gets measured gets done. Here are 5 key dependable factors to help quantify your organization’s ITAM efficacy and success.

TCO (Total cost of ownership)

It indicates the percentage of assets in the asset management system database and its stand-alone and collective remaining value/cost. It showcases a holistic figure of an organization's cost for an asset. According to a survey, a full-blown implementation of Software asset management processes and policies can reduce TCO by nearly 45%. ITAM can bring down the TCO by $759 per asset in terms of individual assets. That's huge!

The median age of assets

This metric will guide you exactly when to retire an asset, or better still, how long to keep using it, corresponding to its efficient and cost-effective utilization. That implies your organization can best optimize the percentage cost incurred by an unused or outdated asset management system.

Licensing info and maintenance agreements

One of the most important KPIs for measuring IT Asset Management system success is the percentage of assets for which the licensing information and maintenance contracts are well laid out. The assets with inadequate information are distinguished from the others and are subject to appropriate consideration.

Percentage of problem tickets

The good performance of the IT Asset Management software implementation can be made evident based on the reduced number of problem tickets being raised by the requesters. Reportedly, problem tickets concerning assets being raised in an organization can be mitigated by up to 40%. This metric is a clear indicator of superior operational efficiency and enhanced productivity.

Asset maintenance labor cost

According to a notable corporate giant, savings of nearly 30% of labor support costs were attributed to ITAM implementation. Asset maintenance labor cost corresponds to the support cost incurred during the entire asset lifecycle – from the day of purchase of an asset to deployment, maintenance, and retirement. According to a survey, companies without ITAM implementation have nearly 37% surplus unwanted assets in their inventory – which amounts to higher asset maintenance labor costs, reducing financial efficiency.

Delivered ITAM to one of the fastest growing 500 companies for global technology services and outsourcing within six continents.

1. Oracle EBS Integration: Integrated Oracle EBS to reconcile real-time HR, finance, employee, owned assets, and project information to raise Purchase Requisitions in Oracle from ServiceNow

2. Automated Asset Lifecycle: Implemented workflows for managing and optimizing the purchase, deployment, maintenance, utilization, costs associated, and disposal of global IT assets

3. Self Service Portal: To raise hardware and software asset provision and release requests for individual, team, or bulk with workflows for up to three level approvals based on asset category

4. 360-degree Asset Compliance: Configured real-time metrics for Admin Access allocation tracking and Admin Access expiry notification

5. Admin Access Control – User: Asset mapping for ~90k hardware and ~6k software assets

6. Integration with SNOW Software: Implemented web service integration with existing snow soft asset library using MID Server

7. Real-time visibility into the entire diverse IT ecosystem, which was earlier working in silos by successful integrations of required tools

Delivered ITAM to a US-based leading supply chain software provider with 4000 global customers

1. Integration with SCCM & JAMF & ServiceNow Discovery to pull endpoint attributes across 2 million installations

2. Normalization for 95k+ software discovery models with leading publishers, including HP, Oracle, IBM, Adobe, and Microsoft

3. Orchestration workflows for purchase order creation in SAP

4. Real-time analytics for License Metrics, Compliance Analysis, Publisher Analytics

5. Identification of 30% of removal candidates from software estate

Delivered ITAM to a leading US-based retirement services company

1. Single source of action: Asset management software Catalog tied into existing ITSM processes and CMDB

2. Integrations: MS SCCM to auto-install licenses if available, O365 to view subscription cost details in ServiceNow

3. Automated SAM workflows: Automated installation & uninstallation of software requested through Service Now- SCCM Integration

4. Real-time reports and dashboards: Quantifiable reports for Microsoft, Oracle, and other publishers, and software showing True Up Cost, Over-licensed Amount, Reclamation requiring attention, and more

5. Outcome: 50+ Software Models created for 20+ high-valued software (s) with 95% Normalization accuracy and patterns

Delivered ITAM to the world’s third-largest telecom giant

1. Streamlined 90100 Assets (computers, peripherals, Servers (ESX, AIX, Linux), printers, routers)

2. Automated Service Catalogues for adding and modifying a Server & Database Deployment.

Conclusion

IT Asset Management is an essential business process, especially in the IT sector, where assets determine business value. Implementing an efficient ITAM system with ServiceNow can bring significant benefits to the organization, such as reducing costs and improving IT service quality. Implementing an ITAM system must also be assessed using key performance metrics like TCO, the median age of assets, licensing info, percentage of problem tickets, and asset maintenance labor cost. By considering these metrics, businesses can track their ITAM system's success and ensure continuous improvement in asset management.

Also, you can utilize an efficient ITAM system with inMorphis. It will help your business make informed decisions, optimize asset usage, and improve operational efficiency, leading to better customer satisfaction and overall organizational success.