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Image: How to Win Your Career and Become Indispensable to Your Organization’s Success: IT Asset Manager Edition

During Flexera’s 20-year history, we’ve seen hundreds of software and hardware asset managers struggle. And no wonder: It’s a tough job. One that requires controlling large amounts of assets throughout their lifecycles in a challenging and constantly uncontrolled environment. Vendors only make things worse, with naming, licensing and usage rights getting more complicated every year.

Now most SAMs and HAMs are ITAMs, and they can have major influence in their organizations if they do their jobs right: optimizing spending, reducing risk and enabling businesses to operate at higher capacity.

If you’re reading this, you probably know what we mean. You might even agree with us. But we’d argue that your sphere of influence should be even bigger. Let us explain:

All IT functions rely on a core element that’s often overlooked in the frenzy of day-to-day activities: the proper, accurate and complete inventory of technologies.

Finance and the CFO. Security and the CIO. The cloud team and the data center. ITSM and the GRC. They all need the best possible information on their software, hardware and services to make decisions day in and day out. But because there’s a constant, lingering doubt about the quality and accuracy of all of the above, decision quality tends to degrade. That leads to poor outcomes (of course), but also to a much-underestimated problem: the loss of agility and relevance.

This is how an ITAM can become a hero

The ITAM who can execute with excellence and own the lifecycle of IT assets from procurement to discharge becomes the center of the universe for the whole organization.

It is possible to capture inventory from every source in one place. And it can be maintained efficiently and automatically with the most current information from inside and outside the organization. All it takes is some planning, political will and preparedness.

Within a centralized repository of information, you must properly process and clean up duplicated, irrelevant and inaccurate data. Flexera research shows that up to 95% of the data typically captured by an organization is irrelevant and that 50% is inaccurate. As an ITAM, your job is to focus on those remaining percentages of data.

But to feed decisions around those assets, information from within the organization needs to be enriched with crucial market data. Consolidation, reclamation, audits, risk reduction, compatibility, migrations and modernization projects are only a few of the initiatives that can benefit from this process—and from the work of an ITAM.

You need an authoritative source of clean inventory that feeds the entire organization. One that’s sponsored, controlled and governed by the ITAM and that works in lockstep with the functions that are key to leveraging it as a precious resource. That’s where Flexera can step in as a partner.

Like SAMs and HAMs, ITAMs still govern the lifecycle of their organizations’ IT assets. Unlike their predecessors, they also govern the quality and availability of the information to all other functions. And that is how you become indispensable.

Learn more about Flexera’s IT asset management and software asset management solutions.