Up to 30% of an IT budget could be saved by effective IT asset management.

Gartner Group

Companies with IT asset management practices experienced 10% fewer hours of downtime and spent 22% fewer person hours. IDC (International Data Corporation)

Optimizing maintenance management can save a firm from 5% to 15% on its maintenance contract charge. Peregrine

Today, no one would dispute that information technology has become the backbone of commerce. Technology helps a business be more efficient and workers more productive. But to get the most out of your technology, you have to manage it just like you manage any other company asset. Moreover, the only way to know what a company has is to inventory the assets and then maintain the inventory list.

Because many companies can achieve significant savings by cutting out waste, knowing your hardware and software inventory can reduce costs, and increase efficiencies and productivity for the company.

How does a technology inventory save money? For example, consider the replacement of old personal computers. You may find that most of your workers using PC?s only employ technologically mature programs - word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail and web browsing. Only a few use software requiring more robust hardware. Do you really need to upgrade the entire company to the latest hardware and software? Is it more appropriate to buy less capable hardware for most and keep legacy software? What are the maintenance and operational implications of such a technology decision? If you don?t know what you have and what workers are actually using, on what basis will you decide what technology is best? Areas that might bear low hanging fruit could include:

Planning and Acquisition
New Business Strategic Initiatives and yearly IT budgeting and planning requires an understanding of your current environment. Once you know what your company has, you are in a position to plan and spend strategically, train users and support staff, develop third party contracts and know the warranty, lease, license and maintenance terms of your hardware and software.

Maintenance and Deployment
Supporting a set of standard tools and applications and knowing what is on each PC without visiting it, increases productivity for both the technology staff and for the end-user. The end-user is more productive because they have the ?right set? of applications and it is possible to eliminate time-wasting software. Technology staff have a better understanding of the environment and can learn about the standard tools instead of knowing a little about an eclectic collection of tools.

Accommodating technology changes and deploying new applications is easier. For example, if your company is considering an upgrade of new operating system or a new release of an application, you need to know your current computer configurations. If you do not have enough RAM on half of your computers for a new operating system, you will waste a lot of money buying licenses for all of your computers. And you will probably need the serial numbers or license certificates to qualify for the often substantial upgrade discounts.

Disposal
Hardware needs to be retired at the right time so that a company can reap the greatest related tax benefits. Improper disposal and not maintaining adequate documentation can result in financial penalties. The last thing a company wants to do is to carry a liability for an asset due to not disposing of that asset properly. Check with your tax advisors to obtain up-to-date and accurate information about the tax effects related to disposing of assets.

Disk drives may contain valuable and sensitive information that you do not want to get into the hands of other people. Think of the cost if a competitor obtained your customer contact list.

Software Management
Keeping track of software applications can assist with maintaining software compliance, thus avoiding fines, embarrassment and business disruption of forced compliance.

Non-compliant software can be eliminated, unused or surplus software can be re-deployed or license fees could be decreased by maintaining accurate license count and software usage.