IT Asset Management Best Practices: A Guide

Every device, license, and piece of software your organization owns is either working for you or costing you. For most companies, it's a mix of both, and without a clear system for tracking and managing IT assets, the costs quietly compound.

The complexity only grows with scale. Across multiple regions and time zones, IT assets become harder to track, easier to misuse, and more likely to create compliance exposure. What starts as a visibility problem becomes a financial one.

That's where IT asset management (ITAM) comes in handy. A well-executed ITAM strategy keeps inventory tidy and creates a continuous feedback loop of cost savings, risk reduction, and smarter decision-making.

Gartner research shows that organizations with comprehensive ITAM practices can cut costs by 10% to 20%. For large enterprises, that's a significant number.

The question isn't whether ITAM delivers value; it's whether your organization has the right approach to capture it.

In this article, we’ll explore ITAM's best practices and strategies for streamlining domestic and global IT asset management.

TL;DR

• IT Asset Management (ITAM) governs how hardware and software are tracked, used, and retired across their lifecycle to control cost, risk, and compliance.
• ITAM provides actionable visibility that helps organizations optimize spend, stay audit-ready, and make informed IT decisions.
• Benefits of ITAM include better asset visibility, reduced software and hardware waste, faster onboarding/offboarding, and improved compliance.
• Without an ITAM, you’re prone to lost or ghost assets, security blind spots, delayed onboarding, failed audits, and growing manual work for IT teams.
• To make the most of ITAM, focus more on high-risk assets, don’t rely on discovery alone, standardize the asset lifecycle, and enforce remote control and security.
• While ITAM tools manage visibility and decisions, Workwize executes the physical device lifecycle (shipping, retrieval, redeployment, and disposal), so best practices actually hold at scale