Barnard says some of the biggest asset management challenges in organisations today are the distributed management of assets, inconsistent process controls and a lack of organisational awareness.

“Because IT and enterprise assets are purchased, received, and/or often managed in a distributed manner, this can result in a lack of visibility of the assets, which subsequently impacts audits and validation. This can also lead to workers’ perceptions that the assets ‘belong’ to them and not the organisation,” he says. “There is a tendency for department managers and end-users to hold onto assets they do not use at all or on a regular basis, which includes laptops, desktops, mobile devices and software applications. This ‘asset hoarding’ can lead to continued purchasing of assets the same as those already owned, but not used or fully utilised. Unused IT and enterprise assets pose increased security and audit risks, as well as driving up costs related to acquiring assets.”

Barnard also highlights the problem of inconsistent or a lack of process controls: “Due to a distributed approach, IT asset management (ITAM), software asset management (SAM) and enterprise asset management (EAM) may be perceived as functions, rather than an unified, organisational discipline. This means any processes and controls that do exist are only applied to the function – not to the organisation.”

He says the challenge with this is policy enforcement: “Many asset policies are at the enterprise levels and don’t reflect the reality or current state of the assets. A common issue with policies, regardless of whether they are valid, is that they are not enforced as they should be. This exposes great financial, compliance and security risks to the organisation.”

Another challenge is organisational awareness, he says. “Even where there are policies and proper processes and controls in place, the organisation (both IT and the enterprise) may not be fully aware of what they are, or why they are important, and may simply ignore them or bypass them,” he says.

“Problems arise either because of no defined scope and/or an understanding of what constitutes an IT asset, an outdated scope, or just a scope that is not well-defined or commonly understood, people are left to their own determination and assumption about what they’re supposed to do when it comes to purchasing or managing IT assets.”

This can lead to shadow IT and external purchasing of assets, which is often, but not always, caused by a traditional procurement-focused approach. Barnard says this typically indicates a lack of awareness of the proper IT or enterprise asset acquisition processes, or the lack of these processes, but is also influenced by the perceived lack of responsiveness from the IT organisation. This can lead to uncontrolled IT assets being introduced into the enterprise, which increases costs as well as security and compliance risks.

Barnard adds that while ITAM and SAM can be managed separately, converging these disciplines and sharing the tools and processes used can reduce complexity and costs.