ServiceNow Asset Management: What on Earth is it and Why Ever Businesses Use it?
ServiceNow Asset Management? What for?
Despite the innumerable marketing materials, YouTube videos, and other documentation explaining the values and specifics of ServiceNow, most people still find it hard to understand how it really functions.
Yes, savvy YouTubers can be sometimes confusing at times and marketing materials can include several buzzwords that make you want to pull out your hair.
But, If you’re struggling to understand ServiceNow Asset Management and how it works, this post is for you
Here, Hanna Schnaider explains the fundamentals of ServiceNow asset management, what it does, and how it can benefit your business.
What is IT asset management (ITAM)?
Commonly called ITAM, is the process of ensuring that the valuable assets in an organization – tangible and intangible – are being productively used and tracked.
Said differently, IT asset management is the process of ensuring an organization’s assets are being deployed, maintained, upgraded, accounted for, and disposed of appropriately.
But a rather complete definition of an IT asset management would be an all-encompassing program allowing you to track all the assets on your network, verifying the relevance of each asset and ensuring it’s up-to-date, as well as ensuring that each asset is sufficiently protected and configured properly.
But what exactly is an IT Asset?
In a layman’s description, IT assets are information, software, and hardware systems that are most crucial to an establishment.
For instance, if your company’s IT department uses the Salesforce Service cloud as a customer service solution, your important assets could be the software licenses that help you ensure you keep offering your customers exceptional customer service.
Further examples of IT assets could include infrastructural lease agreements, company-owned devices, digital data, and so forth.
ITAM is often an ongoing process, requiring continuous vigilance on the part of your IT department as you monitor your asset lifecycle to know when it needs new integrations.
Reasons Why IT Asset Management Is Crucial
Whether you’re an enterprise-level or growing mid-size business, IT asset management can offer many potential benefits for your business – and several misfortunes that come with failing to have a working asset management system in place.
A study by Gartner in 2016 found that organizations can reduce spending on software asset by as much as 30% by implementing IT asset management best practices.
Thus, some good benefits that IT asset management includes:
- Ensures equipment is up-to-date. Having obsolete equipment on your network could negatively influence user experience or cause unreasonable slowdowns for critical business apps. By tracking asset life cycles you can discover ways to properly upgrade or replace them for better productivity.
- Helps to discover single points of failure. Without having a solid map of your network infrastructure, it can become increasingly difficult to know your single points of failure and how to fix them. Fortunately, ITAM simplifies this by allowing you to create your network infrastructure map.
- Helps you keep track of new and incoming assets. While so many businesses are constantly eliminating outdated hardware once it gets to its end of the asset lifecycle, most fail to keep track of incoming assets or account for the removal of the old ones which could lead to inaccuracies in the network architecture map. With IT asset management, you can keep track of these changes and avoid unnecessary troubles.
- Protects against cybercrimes. Remember the JP Morgan Chase data breach in 2014? An article by Reuters confirmed that “JP Morgan’s security team obviously overlooked updating one of its servers with two-step password login” which they had applied to other servers. This loophole became the entry point to cybercriminals who stole around 83 million worth of JP Morgan’s customers. If they had kept their software to data, the breach could have been avoided
What is ServiceNow Asset Management and Why use it?
ServiceNow asset management provides a single system of record that helps to identify various opportunities that help organizations to reduce cost, improve compliance, mitigate security, eliminate wasted resources, and drive standardization.
ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM). ServiceNow IT asset management integrates optimally with other parts of the entire ServiceNow ecosystem which includes:
- ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM)
- ServiceNow IT Asset Repository and Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
- ServiceNow IT Business Management (ITBM)
- IT governance, risk, and compliance management.
After being reviewed by Silicon Valley B2B review service FinancesOnline, ServiceNow IT asset management was rated as FinancesOnline’s No. 1 ITAM software product.
The major key benefits of service is IT asset management mentioned by FinanceOnline’s reviewers includes:
- Helps companies to ensure complete replacement of resources that are no longer functioning
- Ensures companies maximize their resources, exhausting its usage before they expire
- Empowers IT teams to renew contracts, or replace hardware during the periods when they’re needed.
- Automates the process of establishing business relationships among resources Informs IT and teams
- Centralizes asset search
How Does Asset Management Relies On Other ServiceNow Procedures For Effectiveness
As said earlier, ServiceNow’s asset management integrates other functions in the ServiceNow ecosystem to deliver exceptional service.
Although ServiceNow asset management, by caring for financial and contractual asset information, can accomplish a lot, it’s not a standalone process. It depends on further ServiceNow procedure plus apps:
Request Management
Request Management allows users to personally browse the service catalog, ordering new assets, or filling out handover forms.
Configuration Management
This deals with the technical aspects of asset management, covering the maintenance stage of the asset life cycle. You can basically use it for tasks related to asset maintenance.
Procurement
The procurement module helps the user to create a purchase order whenever they request an asset, seeing to the entire purchase lifecycle from imitation to receipt. It specifically supplements asset management by covering the procurement stage of the asset lifecycle.
What are the downsides of ServiceNow Asset Management?
Despite the awesome reviews and benefits of the ServiceNow Asset Management, it’s not without its own downsides and shortcomings. The common downside of ServiceNow asset management includes:
1. No field to track the total cost of ownership (TCO)
There is no actual field in ServiceNow that helps you track the total cost of ownership.
You can gather information such as initial asset cost, maintenance, or repair cost in ServiceNow but if you want to see the total cost of ownership you’ll need to tune the process for tracking maintenance cost in ServiceNow Asset Management and add the formula in the asset records.
2. No patch and version management
ServiceNow won’t be able to manage new versions of your existing apps or software patches as assets. To curb this, you’ll need a specialized custom-made app designed for patches and software versions.
3. Higher cost of implementation
Because ServiceNow integrates other processes to work properly and bring the most value to your organization, you may have to spend some amount of money for setting up these supporting processes to the ServiceNow asset management to work effectively for you.
Conclusion
Despite all these downsides coming along with ServiceNow implementation, it’s nevertheless an awesome asset management tool streamlined to optimize the workflow of your IT departments.
Luckily, our experts at FortySeven Software Professionals fortyseven47.com offer ServiceNow implementation service, handling everything from custom apps to integration, and migration.
Reach out to us if you do need some help.
