IT Asset Management
How to manage your information technology equipment

Financial Times/Prentice Hall, London, 2002

	A growing demand for the integration of IT Asset Management services into organisations’ internal processes and customer facing product portfolios has been observed during the last couple of years. In addition to aspects of Property Accounting, it is mainly organisations’ striving to gain competitive advantage driving the integration of IT Asset Management. Through supporting services and organisational support functions IT Asset Management has a wide potential to gain and sustain competitive advantage through e.g. process excellence. Consequently, IT Asset Management is directly linked into organisational strategy. Given this background of IT Asset Management in business and strategy, it is obvious, that a successful implementation of an IT Asset Management Programme needs to focus on the business’ requirements. I
IT Asset Management Programmes   IT Asset Management Programmes have to be understood as a solution to a problem, rather than being “strategic” on its own. A set of clearly defined business requirements are necessary to map the expected functionality into a technology, which will meet the organisations needs and hence provide a high return on investment. Concentrating on tools and technology prior to defining the organisation’s requirements is likely to lead to failure of the programme and to not achieving the expected return of investment and competitive advantage. IT Asset Management potentially impacts a number of financial aspects, directly or indirectly.   IT Asset Management Services Model   Maintaining a holistic approach towards IT Asset Management, a model of five key components, Inventory Management, Configuration Management, Change Management, Order Processing, Contract Management can be applied. Besides providing a clarified terminology, the definition of each of the components allows a homogeneous organisational understanding of relations, process integration and functionality. An outline of service deliverables for each of the key components allows to precisely describing an organisation’s requirements for IT Asset Management, also reflecting the dependencies between deliverables.   Implementation   The implementation of IT Asset Management is ideally an iterative process, which will allow to gain benefits in the early stages of the project in order to minimise the initial negative impact on cash flow through necessary investments. Nevertheless, a comprehensive project plan is required, which offers an overview of the entire programme implementation and also covers the hand over of IT Asset Management services into operations.
Keywords: IT Asset Management, ITAM, IT Outsourcing, IS Capabilities, Competitive Advantage.

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