Assets guide to ITAM (IT Asset Management)

What is Assets?

Assets is Jira Service Management’s native asset and configuration management tool. It gives teams a flexible and dynamic way to track all kinds of assets and configuration items (CIs), enabling teams to easily link them to service requests, incidents, problems, changes, and workloads. This helps those teams to understand and visualise the critical relationships between applications, services, their underlying infrastructure, and other key dependencies.

What is IT Asset Management?

IT Asset Management (also known as ITAM) is the process of ensuring an organization’s assets are accounted for, deployed, maintained, upgraded, and disposed of when the time comes. Put simply, it’s making sure that the valuable items, tangible and intangible, in your organization are tracked and being used.  

So, what’s an IT asset? Defined simply, an IT asset includes hardware, software systems, or information an organization values. In Atlassian’s IT department, some of our most important assets are the computers and software licenses that help us build, sell, and support our software and the servers we host it on. 

IT assets have a finite period of use. To maximize the value an organization can generate from them, the IT asset lifecycle can be proactively managed. Each organization may define unique stages of that lifecycle, but they generally include planning, procurement, deployment, maintenance, and retirement.   An important part of IT asset management is applying process across all lifecycle stages to understand the total cost of ownership and optimize the use of assets.

In the past, IT departments were able to control assets within their own domain. Now, an organization’s asset management practice extends far beyond the hardware that’s issued with an official IT stamp of approval.  Subscription-based software and employees expectation to customize the tools they work with through marketplaces and app stores, present new asset management challenges. The way modern teams work requires that IT teams be flexible and adapt their asset management process to best enable the business. 

As various teams push to work with the tools that best fit their needs, asset management is an even more important part of an organisation’s overall strategy and provides up-to-date information to reduce risks and costs. An asset management process creates a single source of truth when optimizing budgets, supporting lifecycle management, and making decisions that impact the entire organization. 

As teams outside of IT begin to embrace service management, asset management has also become important to a variety of departments. We’ve heard of organizations using asset management software to manage things ranging from fleets, to fish, to insurance, to musical instruments. 

How can I use Assets for my ITAM needs?

Assets can be the backbone of your organisation’s ITAM practice.

Assets provides a single source of truth that you can use to simplify and reconcile your data, and can enable your productivity without sacrificing reliability.

Take a look at the guide below to get started with Assets and ITAM.