IT Asset Management · ITAM
IT Asset Management (ITAM)
What is IT asset management?
- Licenses and accounts are assets too, not just equipment
- Update it the same day as every reassignment, purchase, or disposal
- Data-erasure records for retired equipment serve as proof
Once an asset register exists, the question 'Where did that laptop go?' disappears. Equipment that departed employees never returned, monitors gathering dust in storage, and servers that cost maintenance fees without being used all show up in the numbers. The key is to treat software licenses and cloud accounts as assets too, not just hardware, because a company's IT spend today is larger on licenses than on equipment. Without a register, you cannot answer 'how many genuine licenses do we have?' during an audit, and the result is often simply buying more.
A single asset's lifecycle runs from purchase request, receiving and tagging, assignment, transfer or replacement, and return, to disposal (including data erasure). The register records the asset number, model and specs, purchase date and cost, warranty expiry, current user and department, and status. For software, it also records license quantity, installed quantity, and contract expiry. In practice, it works best to keep hardware asset management and software asset management (SAM) in the same register but on different review cycles: physical inventory checks quarterly for equipment, and a usage reconciliation 60 days before renewal for licenses. International standards such as ISO/IEC 19770 define this management framework, so they come up as the benchmark in major-corporation audits and client security reviews.
Where this meets training and HR is onboarding and offboarding. Whether a new hire gets a laptop and accounts within a few days, and whether a departing employee’s equipment is collected on their last day, depends on the asset register being linked to HR assignment data. During year-end departures, it works well to list the equipment number and installed software on the return checklist and confirm them at the exit interview. Tablets or practice laptops bought for training should be registered as shared department assets with a separate usage log so that accountability for losses doesn’t get blurred.
The most common failure in practice is building the register once and never updating it. A register that starts as a single Excel sheet drifts from reality within three months, and after that nobody trusts it and people go back to 'asking around.' Another recurring incident is selling retired equipment secondhand without wiping the storage drives, which can lead to a personal data breach. With licenses, the most common mistake is assuming 'we bought them, so we must be using them all.' If installs exceed purchases, it is an audit finding; if usage falls far short, money is leaking. A register stays a living document only when it is updated the same day for every reassignment, purchase, and disposal.
Jaryong KooMarketing PhD and leading authority on AI, data analytics, and personal branding
Seungtae ParkAX practitioner who builds AI business development and marketing automation tools and teaches from that hands-on experienceIt began when companies extended their fixed-asset management practices to computer equipment. Since the 1990s, as crackdowns on software piracy and license audits increased, software asset management (SAM) became a field of its own. The ISO/IEC 19770 series of international standards defines IT asset management processes and data formats.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, a medical device manufacturer with 480 employees, kept its laptop register in Excel, but it had not been updated for two years. Of the 9 employees who left in December, no one could confirm whether 2 had returned their equipment, and the company could not answer a client’s security audit question about how many software licenses it held.
- Manager Jung in General Affairs worked with the IT team to run a two-week physical inventory across all departments. They found 17 unaccounted-for laptops out of 512, and 6 of them turned out to have been taken by departed employees.
- Cross-checking licenses showed that the design software had 30 licenses purchased but was installed on 38 machines, while only 410 of 500 office licenses were in use. Manager Jung reported, 'Fixing just these two would offset the cost.'
- Working with the HR director, we added asset numbers and the list of installed software to the exit interview checklist, and changed the process so that IT signs off on returned equipment on the employee's last day.
- The 20 tablets the training team had bought for practice sessions were re-registered as shared department assets, with a loan register, so after a session no one is left wondering who took them.
- After the quarterly inventory became standard practice, the June inventory the following year showed unaccounted-for equipment down from 17 units to 1, zero over-installed licenses, and annual savings of KRW 13 million (≈ US$9,730) from returning unused licenses.