Operational excellence planning requires the list of IT inventories and tracks their use. These inventories include infrastructure hardware such as physical servers, network devices, storage, end-user devices, and so on. You also need to keep track of software licenses, operational data, legal contracts, compliance, and so on. IT assets include any system, hardware, or information that a company is using to perform a business activity.

Keeping track of IT assets helps an organization to make strategic and tactical decisions regarding operational support and planning. However, managing IT assets in a large organization could be a very daunting task. Various ITAM tools are available for the operations team to help in the asset management process. Some of the most popular ITAM tools are SolarWinds, Freshservice, ServiceDesk Plus, Asset Panda, PagerDuty, Jira Service Desk, and so on.

IT management is more than tracking IT assets. It also involves monitoring and collecting asset data continuously, to optimize usages and operation costs. ITAM makes the organization more agile by the provided end-to-end visibility and the ability to apply patches and upgrades quickly. The following diagram illustrates IT asset life cycle management (ITALM):

As shown in the preceding diagram, the ITALM process includes the following phases:

• Plan: An asset life cycle starts with planning, which is a more strategic focus to determine needs for overall IT assets and procurement methods. It includes cost-benefit analysis and total cost of ownership.

• Procure: In the procurement phase, organizations acquire the asset based on the outcome of planning. They may also decide to develop some holdings as required—for example, in-house software for logging and monitoring.
• Integrate: In this phase, an asset is installed in the IT ecosystem. It includes operation and support of the asset, and defines user access—for example, installing a log agent to collect logs from all the servers in a centralized dashboard, and restricting monitoring dashboard metrics to the IT operations team.
• Maintain: In the maintenance phase, the IT operations team keeps track of assets, and acts to upgrade or migrate based on the asset life cycle—for example, applying a security patch provided by the software vendor. The other example is keeping track of end of life for licensed software, such as a plan to migrate from Windows 2008 to Windows 2016, as the old operating system is getting to the end of its life.
• Retire: In the retirement phase, the operations team disposes of the end-of-life asset. For example, if an old database server is getting to the end of its life, then the team takes action to upgrade it and migrates the required user and support to the new server.

ITAM helps organizations adhere to ISO 19770 compliance requirements. It includes software procurement, deployment, upgrade, and support. ITAM provides better data security and helps to improve software compliance. It provides better communication between business units such as operation, finance, and marketing teams, and frontline staff.