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AI for IT Asset Management: Automation, optimization, security

EY Americas
EY Americas

Multidisciplinary professional services organization

5 minute read 23 Jan 2024
Related topics
Consulting

Unleash the power of AI to revolutionize IT Asset Management by automating tasks, optimizing resources, and enhancing security.

In brief
  • AI revolutionizes ITAM, automating tasks, providing insights, and optimizing resources to enhance efficiency, effectiveness, and security.
  • Challenges of data quality, complexity, and cost must be addressed for successful integration, but AI offers unparalleled opportunities for asset optimization.

We have all been witness to the exponential growth of artificial intelligence (AI), both in our personal and professional lives. Integrating AI into various industries has led to profound changes in the way businesses operate, with the expectation that this will only accelerate. One area witnessing significant transformation is IT asset management (ITAM). Traditionally seen as a time- and labor-intensive task, AI is revolutionizing ITAM by automating processes and tasks, providing insights, enabling predictive trends and optimizing resource allocation to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and security of organizations’ IT assets and processes, while enabling ITAM professionals supporting the business to focus on driving meaningful impact.

How EY can help

ITAM(AI) as we see it today

 

Effective ITAM is predicated on being both a consumer and producer of information to manage the asset lifecycle. AI is unlocking greater value within this space across three key areas:

Automating processes and tasks: AI can automate many manual tasks, including asset discovery, inventory management and compliance reporting. This frees up ITAM practitioners to focus on more strategic tasks, such as forecasting, financial planning and risk mitigation.

 

Consider this:

 

  • Asset discovery: AI-powered tools automatically scan networks and systems to identify all IT assets, with the intelligence to capture the full estate, helping to ensure that nothing is missing or misconfigured.
  • Inventory management: AI tracks an organization’s IT asset inventory, including location, configuration and usage, optimizing asset utilization and identifying security risks.

Providing insights and trends: AI can analyze vast data sets to identify trends and patterns, including those difficult for humans to discern. This powerful analytics engine can enhance business decision-making, such as determining critical assets and identifying those at risk of compromising the organization.

 

Consider this:

 

  • Data quality: AI can generate a set of missing data points in an existing configuration management database so that stakeholders are aware of missing data and correct it at the data source level. This provides continual improvement to data quality.
  • Compliance reporting: AI generates tailored compliance reports interpreting an organization’s contracts, what’s in its environment and associated usage, ensuring organizations adhere to relevant regulations and contractual obligations.
  • Financial planning: AI interprets an organization’s past contractual, deployment and usage trends; reconciles with other business data sets; and determines future needs as the organization grows, leading to more tactical investment decisioning.
  • Making predictions: AI leverages historical data to predict future trends and events, aiding in planning for hardware and software requirements and identifying security threats. AI-driven natural language processing (NLP) simplifies communication between IT staff and asset tracking systems.

 

Consider this:

  • Risk management: AI identifies and assesses risks associated with IT assets, enabling prioritization of security investments and risk mitigation.
  • Process automation: AI identifies root causes of ITAM issues and automates processes across the IT asset lifecycle.

ITAM(AI) tomorrow

The potential of AI on ITAM is clear. AI can accelerate automation, provide insights and make predictions that can help organizations improve the efficiency, effectiveness and security of their ITAM processes. As AI technology continues to mature, it is likely to have an even greater impact on the way that organizations manage their IT assets.

Consider this:

  • Autonomous systems: AI-equipped systems could automate routine tasks, such as hardware inventory audits and software procurement, freeing up human resources for strategic initiatives.
  • Software license management: AI may intensify its role, analyzing usage patterns to provide optimization suggestions.
  • Security measures: AI-driven anomaly detection will identify unauthorized access and potential threats for both hardware and software assets, enabling a more nimble and rapid response.

AI is not a silver bullet

The potential benefits of AI in ITAM abound, but they do not prevail without addressing core business challenges.

  • Data quality: AI solutions depend on high-quality data; inaccuracies or incompleteness can lead to unreliable results. It is imperative for any ITAM program to invest in continuous, reliable data hygiene to generate critical business insights, whether with or without automation.
  • Complexity: Implementing and managing AI solutions can be complex, requiring the right skills and resources. ITAM programs rely on data sets across the business and generate data sets for others as both a consumer and producer of information. Organizational alignment based on sound processes and accountability is key in introducing AI to support ITAM.
  • Cost: AI-powered solutions can be expensive; organizations must carefully weigh the costs against the benefits. There may be alternative avenues worth exploring to incrementally mature the ITAM function in pursuit of similar business outcomes on the roadmap to automation.

Conclusion

AI’s impact on IT asset management, specifically concerning hardware and software assets, has been transformative already and will continue to transform the function. This integration streamlines operations, bolsters accuracy, empowers strategic decision-making and elevates ITAM as critical to the business. As AI technologies continue to evolve, ITAM practices will keep pace, offering organizations unparalleled opportunities to optimize their hardware and software assets for maximum efficiency and cost effectiveness. The synergy between AI and ITAM holds the key to a new era of asset management.

The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ernst & Young LLP or other members of the global EY organization.

Summary 

We have witnessed exponential AI growth, bringing profound changes to business operations. AI revolutionizes ITAM through automation, insights, predictive trends, and resource optimization. It enhances efficiency, effectiveness, and security by freeing up practitioners, analyzing data, and predicting events. AI also offers automation benefits, improves software management, and strengthens security measures. However, challenges like data quality and complexity must be addressed. AI integration streamlines operations, empowers decisions, and elevates asset management. The AI-ITAM synergy unlocks new possibilities.

About this article

EY Americas
EY Americas
Multidisciplinary professional services organization
Related topics
Consulting

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.