ITAM best practice 5: Keep tabs on the metrics that matter.

In this blog from our ITAM best practice series, you can learn how to keep tabs on the metrics that matter. The goal is to track the right KPIs to drive better decisions.

Generating specific ITAM reports can help you accomplish specific objectives. Let's take a look at a few of those objectives and their corresponding reports. 

If formulating an effective IT budget is your goal, track the

  • Average cost of a workstation

  • Average cost of a license

  • Total asset spending, broken up by vendors

  • Total value of assets owned

If you are looking to stay license compliant, look at the

  • Ratio of used to purchased licenses

  • Software licenses by expiration date

  • Number of licenses available 

If you need to make effective purchase decisions, check out the

  • Depreciation rate of assets

  • Average lease violation fines paid

  • Average cost of maintaining an asset

  • Number of workstations in repair

If you want to identify discrepancies to your IT environment, keep an eye on the

  • Number of unauthorized configuration items

  • Assets identified as the cause of service failures 

  • Audit history 

If you need to optimally use existing resources, watch the number of

  • Unassigned workstations

  • Users with more than one workstation

  • Users without a mapped workstation

Today's tools offer the advantage of generating both built-in standard reports, as well as custom reports. Pre-configured standard reports can be generated at the click of a button. This eliminates redundant effort and saves a lot of time if you are looking to generate a report multiple times under various scenarios. Reports can also be custom built-using an interactive platform whenever you want.

It is good practice to pin key metrics that matter to your dashboard. Some tools allow you to add generated reports as dashboard widgets. This ensures that the information you seek is readily available. Here are a few dashboard components every IT asset manager should track:

  • Workstations by operating system

  • Software usage to monitor rarely used, unused, and frequently used software

  • License compliance details

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the comments section below. In the next blog we will see how to conduct self audits. In the meanwhile, if you are looking for an out of the box IT service desk solution with built-in ITAM capabilities, we encourage you to check out ServiceDesk Plus.