How to Start an IT Asset Department

What is this course? - In this course I will teach you how to start a unique and powerful department in your organization. Almost all companies worldwide will have the usual departments like sales, marketing, HR, tech support, finance, purchase, R&D, and so on. But they will be missing one important department, and that is called the IT Asset Management or ITAM for short. This is the missing powerful techno-commercial department that is absolutely necessary to keep the top management, auditors, and finance departments happy. In this course I will explain the pressing need for having such a department in your organization, and also the usual reasons why such an important department usually doesn't exist in most companies.

Why such a course? - Most technical departments do not think that IT asset management is a crucial function, and hence they have a low level of maturity. This is because they mistakenly assume this is only a boring stores management activity. Secondly, most technical staff will be unable and unwilling to do such activities as it involves non-glamorous activities like maintaining paperwork, taking stock, managing inventory, process invoices, etc. But the costs and headaches of not having a proper IT asset team are huge. Without ITAM there will be no control over IT assets, budgets will overshoot, old and obsolete equipment will be lying all around, software licensing will be a mess, theft and misplacement will become rampant, audits and data security will fail, and so on.

What are the prerequisites? – To appreciate and implement this course you must belong to this kind of audience - Technology managers, Finance managers, Auditors, CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, IT consultants, and anyone who manages IT assets in an organization and is responsible for optimizing its costs.

What will you gain? – By implementing an ITAM team you (and your team) will gain valuable business skills like technical leadership, financial leadership, vendor management, and also the ability to interact with all layers of employees in your organization. Secondly, no other department can offer the wide range of business skills that an ITAM department will provide to its team members within a single department.

Here you will gain a tremendous amount of industry knowledge about hardware and software as you will be continuously involved in the life-cycle of an asset. You can gain industry contacts, attend useful seminars, meet subject experts, and even get help in career moves.

Management will depend on your data for approving budgets, save costs, and take strategic decisions. You will attend important meetings to present the ongoing and impending IT costs to the management. Senior management can take better decisions regarding their IT infrastructure with a properly functioning ITAM department.

As you can see from the above, very few departments offer such opportunities for an employee in a single department. This is why asset management is a crucial function for any organization, and can be compared to the armed forces of a country that protect the nation’s assets. I hope the information provided in this course is useful enough to kick start a professional IT asset management team in your organization. I would love to hear your comments and suggestions for this course.

Thanks for watching and good luck.