Technology asset management is an integral part of the effective running of IT assets from hardware, software, and individual devices to entire networks of your organizations. Failing to do so will lead to these assets not performing collectively, causing both financial and reputational damages. However, it’s not an easy task to track and manage assets. It can be a complex and time-consuming task, especially if done manually or without effective asset management solutions. That’s where ServiceNow ITAM comes in!
ServiceNow is a cloud-based platform designed to help organizations streamline their IT operations by providing automated workflows for asset management tasks. It offers reliable, interactive asset management solutions for increased visibility and lifecycle automation of all assets on one platform. In this we will explore how organizations can utilize ServiceNow’s tools to optimize and automate their IT asset management processes. In addition, we will also discuss the best practices to implement while using the technology asset management solutions of ServiceNow.
ServiceNow ITAM in Action: An Overview
Let’s explore five ways to successfully automate IT asset management using ServiceNow:
1. Asset Discovery and Inventory
Automate IT asset management to discover and inventory all the assets in your IT environment. This is to get you a complete and accurate picture of what IT assets you have, where it is, who owns it, and how it is used. ServiceNow provides several tools to automate asset discovery and inventory, such as:
- Discovery: It scans your network and collects information about the devices, applications, and services running on it.
- Service Mapping: Builds on Discovery to create a service-centric view of your IT environment.
- Configuration Management Database (CMDB): Acts as a single source of truth for your IT asset data. Thus, enabling you to track and manage the attributes, relationships, and lifecycle status of each asset.
2. Asset Procurement and Provisioning
The process of procuring and provisioning new assets not only helps you optimize the use of your existing assets, and avoid unnecessary purchases or duplication, but it does more. It also ensures the timely delivery of new assets to meet the demand. With ServiceNow, you get tools to automate asset procurement and provisioning, such as:
- Service Catalog: It allows users to request new assets or services from a predefined list of options. It can be customized to suit your organization’s requirements.
- Orchestration: It automates the execution of complex tasks or workflows across multiple systems or applications. Tasks such as purchasing new assets or services, installing software, configuring settings, etc.
- Asset Management: This handles all the financial aspects of your IT assets, such as costs, depreciation, amortization, etc.
3. Asset Maintenance And Support
When you automate tasks related to maintenance and support, you ensure the reliability and availability of your IT assets. Thus, preventing or resolving issues, and extending the lifespan of your assets. With the help of ServiceNow technology asset management tools, automate asset maintenance and support:
- Incident Management: It allows users to report and track issues or problems with their IT assets or services.
- Change Management: You can request and manage changes or updates to any IT assets or services.
- Problem Management: Allows users to identify and address the underlying causes of recurring or major incidents or problems with their IT assets or services.
4. Asset Retirement And Disposal
Retiring or disposing of your obsolete or unwanted assets not only helps you free up space and resources and reduce costs but you get more. Doing so also, ensures your IT assets comply with environmental and legal regulations. Gain efficiency with ServiceNow tools such:
- Asset Lifecycle Management: Using this, users can define and manage the different stages of the IT asset lifecycle, from procurement to disposal.
- Asset Disposal: It allows users to request and execute the disposal of their IT assets, and removal of assets, as well as notify the relevant stakeholders and users.
- Asset Compliance: A tool that allows users to ensure that their IT assets comply with various environmental and legal regulations, such as data protection, waste management, recycling, etc.
5. Asset Reporting And Analytics
This helps in gaining insights into your IT asset performance, usage, trends, and opportunities. Thereby, allowing you a chance to improve your IT asset management strategy and outcomes. Utilize these ServiceNow asset management tools to automate asset reporting and analytics effectively:
- Performance Analytics: This lets users measure and monitor the KPIs and metrics of their IT assets and services.
- Dashboards: Users can create and customize interactive dashboards that display various charts, graphs, tables, and widgets related to their IT assets and services.
- Reports: Create and generate various reports to summarize and highlight your IT asset data.
How ServiceNow ITAM is Suitable for a Business
From purchasing, receiving, migrating, retiring, disposing, and upgrading these assets, you can do all these from one single platform. Additionally, businesses can also take help from ServiceNow experts offering solutions for ServiceNow ITAM advisory, consulting, development, support, testing, implementation, migration, and maintenance. According to ServiceNow website, it can automate many processes, including:
- HR processes, such as onboarding, offboarding, and employee self-service
- IT and business processes for operations management, such as password reset and client software distribution
- Application monitoring, functional UI testing, continuous testing, agile transformation, regression testing,
- DevOps, test automation, and end-to-end testing
- Code development and testing, security testing, workflows, infrastructure implementations and changes, and validation of configuration management changes
- Cloud observability, application portfolio management, enterprise asset management, clinical device management, third-party risk management, telecommunications network inventory, telecommunications service operations management, and operational technology management.
Top Benefits of ServiceNow ITAM Solutions
- It Saves Money: One of the critical elements to curb the costs is optimizing the spending on software, infrastructure, and platform services. Businesses can cut spending when they use best practices to enhance software licenses and assets. This can be implementing an effective and practical technology asset management process to help you manage your devices’ health, status, and maintenance, reducing costs associated with poor asset tracking.
- Depend on Spreadsheets: Some companies still track their assets while using spreadsheets, but there is a greater chance that spreadsheets won’t always be accurate. Moreover, spreadsheets store data, creating difficulties for all authorized users to use the same up-to-date info. ServiceNow’s asset management solutions simplify it by getting a designated location to organize all of your assets.
- Difficult to Keep up the Pace of Change: Assets are constantly changed, and manual tracking is an overwhelming task, at times. However, with ServiceNow ITAM solutions, you can deal with issues such as replacement, the retirement of IT assets, new shipments, theft, etc., easily and be updated with these evolving changes in features or functionalities.
- Shadow IT is Reality: Shadow IT demonstrates the applications, licenses, and other IT assets being bought and used without the information of the IT team. The centralized (ITAM) software has IT in the loop and avoids overspending, risk, and non-compliance. Shadow IT is an authenticity close to all modern businesses face; managing it and a difference in the control level still has to lower the risks and spending.
ServiceNow ITAM: A Combo for Efficiency & Accuracy
Technology is going to be an essential key for organizations striving for digital transformation. It’s practical to focus on how to utilize next-generation technology asset management solutions rather than blindly spending money on enterprise technology. Tools like ServiceNow IT asset management not only help businesses automate, simplify, and streamline their ITAM processes but it enables them to do more. With the help of ITAM strategy and ServiceNow, organizations can act quickly, optimize, utilize, minimize risk, and cut costs.
However, to achieve this level of efficiency and accuracy, businesses need to know the best practices to run the software and the process. This blog not only discussed the best practices to automate ITAM with ServiceNow but also shared tips on how to automate ServiceNow ITAM solutions. Additionally, a top-notch enterprise software solutions provider can also be integral to running your ITAM process in ServiceNow, thus making the process a long-term positive piece in your organization.
