Ghost assets are hardware and software that are listed on accounting ledgers but don’t do anything useful for the business. They can take up to 25% of a company’s IT budget. This number is a huge, hidden drain on the budget for IT directors and procurement leaders. Most organizations have more than one discovery tool, procurement database, and Active Directory, so the problem is almost never a lack of data. The problem is turning that raw data into useful information.
While a robust IT Asset Management (ITAM) program may result in success stories, telling these stories alone is not enough to prove value to senior stakeholders. ITAM managers want to transform their departments from being cost centers to revenue generators by providing strategic value to the organization.
To accomplish this, they need to define, track, and manage a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This paper will discuss the most critical metrics your organization should include in your IT Asset Management dashboard to provide value to your stakeholders and prove ROI.
Optimal ITAM practice strives to meet several goals, including cost efficiency, operational velocity, and full compliance with organizational policies and external requirements. If one only sees metrics in isolation, then often a distorted view of ITAM performance is gained. A unified dashboard should therefore categorize KPIs to show the relationship between metrics.
The C-suite speaks mostly in financial terms. These indicators measure the program’s direct financial effects, focusing on lowering costs, making the best use of the budget, and the return on investment for the ITAM tools themselves.
Operational metrics check how quickly and accurately the ITAM lifecycle goes. They answer questions about how quickly assets are put into use, how accurately the inventory reflects reality, and how well the organization gets back equipment when employees leave.
Compliance metrics measure how much money the organization could lose and how vulnerable its security is. These indicators keep track of how well people follow software licensing agreements, internal security policies, and rules about how to destroy data.
Service quality metrics look at the ITAM program from the point of view of the end user. They keep track of how often problems with assets affect productivity and how happy employees are with the provisioning process.
Showing that the ITAM program is worth the money is the best way to get more funding and support from executives. These metrics go beyond just the purchase price to show the real economic effect of asset management.
TCO figures out the total cost of owning an asset over its entire life. It includes the cost of buying the software, licensing it, maintenance contracts, support desk time, and the fees for getting rid of it later. IT can make decisions about standardizing hardware and whether to lease or buy based on data by keeping track of TCO for each asset class, such as a standard laptop versus a high-performance workstation.
We need to figure out how much money the ITAM program itself makes. This metric compares the total cost of running the program (software tools, dedicated headcount, consulting fees) to the documented financial benefits (avoiding audit penalties, putting off hardware purchases, and getting back software licenses). A well-established ITAM program should always give you a ROI of more than 300%.
Cost avoidance is the amount of money saved by using existing assets instead of buying new ones. When a department asks for new laptops and the ITAM team uses old laptops that were no longer needed because of a recent layoff, the cost of not having to buy new ones is counted as a direct financial win for the program.
Buying software licenses is often a bigger ongoing cost than buying hardware. This metric keeps track of the money saved by finding software subscriptions that aren’t being used or aren’t being used enough and either canceling them or moving them to a cheaper tier.
When hardware is no longer useful to the business, it often still has some market value. This metric keeps track of the money made by selling old IT assets to IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) partners, which helps pay for new purchases.
Efficiency metrics show how well the ITAM team does its main jobs. When these areas are done well, employees are more productive, and IT support costs go down.
The utilization rate shows what percentage of the total asset inventory is currently being used and assigned. A low utilization rate means that too much inventory is being built up and money is being wasted. A rate close to 100% means that the supply chain is fragile and can’t handle sudden hardware failures or hiring surges.
The most important measure of any ITAM program is how accurate its inventory is. You can figure it out by looking at the records in the ITAM database and comparing them to what you find during regular audits. An accuracy rate lower than 95% makes the ITAM data less trustworthy and less useful for planning ahead.
This metric keeps track of how long it takes for an approved hardware request to be sent in and for the fully set-up device to be delivered to the end user. Cutting down on deployment time makes it easier for new hires to get started and keeps existing employees from having to wait for new hardware.
MTTP is all about the process of giving out software and access rights. It tells you how long it usually takes to give a user access to the apps and network resources they need after the hardware has been set up. To lower this number, you need automated provisioning workflows.
When an employee quits, it’s important for both security and financial reasons to get back the hardware they were using. This measure keeps track of the percentage of assets that are successfully returned within a certain amount of time (for example, 7 days) after termination. A low recovery rate is a big reason why there are ghost assets.
Ghost assets are present in the ledger but do not actually exist (often referred to as zombie assets). Zombie assets are present in the ledger and utilizing resources on the network, these assets are not recorded in the organization’s ITAM database. This metric measures the extent to which the ITAM team is able to identify and address these types of issues, ultimately improving the organization’s overall inventory accuracy and security posture.
The cost of failing a software audit can be severe, even catastrophic, reaching millions of dollars. By monitoring and using key compliance metrics, organizations can determine where potential issues exist and proactively address them before an adverse event occurs – whether it is an unwanted software audit or a security breach that could also cost millions.
This is the most important measure of compliance. It looks at how many software installations there are compared to how many entitlements were bought. A compliance rate below 100% means the company is legally and financially responsible, while a rate above 100% means it is wasting money by buying too much.
Audit readiness is a set of measurements that show how well an organization can respond to a request for an audit from a vendor. It takes into account how accurate the inventory is, how complete the entitlement documentation (proof of purchase) is, and how quickly a full compliance report can be made.
This metric keeps track of how often the ITAM system finds unauthorized software installations or hardware that isn’t approved for use on the corporate network. A high detection rate means that the discovery tools are working well, but it also shows that the security controls at the endpoints or the education of the users need to be better.
ITAM data is very important for managing vulnerabilities. This metric tells you what percentage of active assets have the most recent security patches installed. An accurate ITAM database makes sure that security teams don’t miss devices that are vulnerable when they deploy patches.
Using hardware or software that the vendor no longer supports is very dangerous for security. This metric keeps track of the percentage of inventory that is getting close to or past its EOL date. This lets IT plan replacements ahead of time so that the assets don’t become a liability.
The people who use ITAM services the most are the employees. Service quality metrics make sure that trying to save money and follow the rules doesn’t make the user experience worse.
This metric, which comes from automated surveys sent out after deployment, shows how happy the end user is with the speed, accuracy, and communication around their hardware or software request.
A sudden rise in support tickets about hardware failures or software performance problems usually means that the equipment is getting old or that the configurations don’t work together. ITAM teams can find out which asset models are causing support costs to rise and should be retired by keeping track of this volume.
This metric tells you how much work an employee can’t do because of a hardware failure or a delayed request for software provisioning. One of the main reasons for keeping a strategic buffer of spare equipment is to reduce downtime related to assets.
Modern ITAM programs use self-service portals, which are often linked to smart lockers, to let users ask for and get standard peripherals without needing help from IT. This metric shows the percentage of requests that were successfully completed through the portal compared to those that had to be escalated manually.
Data is only useful if it is shared in a clear way. Executive dashboards need to turn complicated operational metrics into useful business information.
The C-suite doesn’t need to see the MTTP for a certain piece of software. Dashboards for executives should only show high-level financial impact (ROI, cost avoidance), critical risk exposure (audit readiness, EOL assets), and the overall health of the program (inventory accuracy).
Dashboards need to be easy to understand right away. Use trend lines to show how things have changed over time, heat maps to show where there is a lot of risk (like departments with low asset recovery rates), and clear red, yellow, and green status indicators for compliance metrics. Don’t use charts that are too busy and need a lot of explaining.
Your operational teams need an online dashboard to monitor current progress as part of their daily work to handle routine tasks and respond to unexpected problems. Your executive team needs historical trend reports to monitor the progress of your ITAM program over time, for example, comparing last month to this month, or last quarter to this quarter.
Context is very important when writing reports for executives. When you can, compare your internal KPIs to those of other companies in your field. Showing that the organization’s asset utilization rate is 15% higher than the industry average is a strong way to prove that the ITAM team is doing a good job.
A dashboard is not a solution but a diagnostic tool. The real value of ITAM metrics is in using the data to make operations better all the time.
Metrics show where things aren’t working well. The ITAM team can make a rule that requires stronger justification for those specific asset classes if the data shows that a certain department always asks for high-end workstations but only uses less than 30% of the processing power.
The ITAM team needs to find out why a KPI is below the target threshold. A drop in the asset recovery rate could be due to a breakdown in communication between HR and IT during the offboarding process, not a problem with the ITAM tool itself.
Metrics give you a starting point for making goals that are realistic and can be measured. The ITAM manager can set a goal of 92% for the next quarter if the current inventory accuracy is 85%. To reach that goal, they can do things like deploy new discovery agents or do targeted physical audits.
In an ever-changing environment, metrics need to be as dynamic and changeable as the IT infrastructure it is managing. As an organization becomes more advanced in its use of new technology, the key KPIs reported on an ITAM dashboard are likely to change to include new metrics relevant to the services provided by cloud or the influx of IoT devices entering the organization. ITAM metrics and KPIs are expected to change as the function matures to meet the evolving needs of the business.
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