IT Asset Tracking Methods in Companies
As corporate purse strings get increasingly tightened in this period of downturn, the need for organisations to perform IT asset management is becoming more of a priority.It is the IT manager whose role is to manage this process of auditing and tracking IT assets.I have dealt with many IT managers in the past, from a wide range of different organizations, and below is a brief summary of the methods they used to track IT assets.
Spreadsheets
fixed asset register] information in a giant spreadsheet. The procedure goes along the following lines. At first the spreadsheet is created from an initial asset audit, recording all the hardware and software being used.The most commonly recorded information includes location, name of staff member using the item, purchase date, model and serial numbers and warranty details.The spreadsheet then needs to be manually updated whenever new purchases of hardware or software are made. As with many manual business functions, the spreadsheet’s downfall is that it doesn’t scale well at all.You can imagine how such a spreadsheet would grow to unmanageable proportions as an organization gets bigger.Organizations using the spreadsheet technique also tend not to be able to react effectively to changes in the state of IT assets, such as repairs, depreciation, licenses and getting rid of equipment. It all depends on an extremely organised person making sure it is meticulously up to date.
RFID and Asset Barcoding
The tagging of assets with barcodes has become the norm in many organizations I have dealt with, wherein each piece of hardware is tagged with a scannable barcode which refers to an exact record in the asset register. These barcodes can be scanned using barcode scanners during regular asset audits and for helpdesk support purposes. RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, goes one step beyond traditional barcoding because they allow you to perform a hardware audit without physically scanning each asset. More importantly, RFID asset tracking allows greater flexibility for increasingly mobile equipment such as laptops and PDAs.
Fixed Asset Management Software
There are a good choice of semi-automated and customized asset management software solutions which take a lot of the pain out of the process. I have come across some companies who have created their own custom asset database using SQL and linking this to the intranet to allow multi-user administration. At the most sophisticated end of the scale is specialised “asset management software” (Google it and you’ll see the wide range of options!) covering the tracking, accounting and reporting of ALL fixed assets, not just IT assets, including property, machinery and vehicles. There are also specially designed solutions to meet the growing plethora of asset accounting and tax regulations that companies need to meet - such as compliance with Sarbanes Oxley. The best thing about this kind of solution is that by combining the needs of IT, accounting, helpdesk support, and operations departments you also have a combined budget with which to procure a far more powerful asset management system.
If you have any other solutions your company uses for asset tracking, I’d be interested to read your comments.
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