Most organizations today lay stress on key ITIL concepts in order to obtain better performance from their IT assets
ITIL is essentially an acronym that stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library and it provides a method to govern the policies for various services offered by a company such as information technology services, operations, developments. This basically includes in it service support, its delivery, & management.
IT asset management is the main part of IT service management (ITSM). The Assets include all elements of the software & hardware that are found in the business environment. It includes IT Asset portfolio with respect to risk, cost control, IT governance and compliance & business performance objectives as decided by the business. It makes use of automation to control & monitor the asset management which comprises of all the financial, inventory, operational activities in order to support the life cycle & the strategic management decision making for the IT environment.
Today most organizations lay extensive stress on improving their ITSM related business processes in order to increase their service levels and effectively manage risk to deliver value to the business, effectively managing costs to do more for less and avoid unnecessary expenditures and adequately responding to possible changes in the business environment .
The goals & objective of ITAM includes acquiring IT assets at the minimum cost but with best quality & maximum benefits, optimizing its use, to keep a check on it & dispose off when they are not good for use. It also provides support for planning for mergers or acquisitions regulatory compliance, license renewal, vendor negotiations, contract negotiation and renewal.
With the use of ITAM (IT Asset Management), it has become easy to improve service level & manage risk, use of all resources in an optimized way, which is very important for an organization to run in efficient manner. ITAM in it includes several processes for its implementation. These are asset discovery, financial management along with Inventory management and contract management.
ITAM is one of the basic building blocks for helping companies to achieve ITSM (IT Service management) stability and adhere to the ITIL best practices.
In this process ITIL with a combination of KPI i.e. key performance indicators provides a best solution for any organization. It is used to access if the processes of the organization are going in the pace or not.
As with many other techniques, ITIL concepts too can used in conjunction to KPIs and together can serve as critical success factors. ITIL asset management in particular can benefit from the application of KPIs. Some common KPIs that be framed in this regard include Cost Of Software To Customer, Software Support Personnel Cost, Cost Of "Software Maintenance, Mean Time To Procure,Quality Of Product, Cost Of Hardware Required to name a few.
So usage of KPIs with ITIL asset management presents a win-win situation to most organization as they can be combined to deliver exceptional performance standards.