Build your inventory using multiple discovery sources:

IT asset discovery is a defined process to discover and track IT assets that are on the network. Your major goal should be to establish a central asset repository that comprises all of your IT hardware and software components. Based on the assets used in your organization, choose from a wide list of available scan and discovery techniques such as network scan, domain-based scan, agent-based scan, and distributed asset-based scan. For example, if you are a Windows user, then an agent-based scan would be ideal. It is best to capture as many asset-related attributes as possible, such as asset type, manufacturer name, status, location, and cost in order to shed more light on your scanned assets and understand them better.  

Bridging ITAM with ITIL Processes:

When you are only focusing on ITAM, the full picture can become complicated, and the route is long and it will take a long time to get there. There are so many risks and threats related to IT and lack of control, which can severely challenge your business. You can benefit by also having a focus on your IT Service Management (ITSM) setup along with ITAM in your organization. ITSM and ITAM are often thought of as two separate disciplines, however, they are very closely related siblings when it comes to IT management, yet they often don’t play together as much as they could. While they might often reside within two different IT systems. In the IT environment employees, refer's "Assets" as Hardware and Software. But ITAM goes beyond the assets to also include "the set of business practices that join contracts, inventory functions to support asset lifecycle management. ITAM can be integrated with many ITIL processes that are included in ITSM including Incident Management, Enterprise Service Management, Change Management, Purchase Management, and much more. ITSM ensures the timely delivery of essential services and support for the Enterprise. When ITSM and ITAM can be integrated, they offer several benefits that can help IT organizations reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and reduce downtime.

Manage Asset through lifecycle-based approach:

IT assets have a finite period of use. So to maximize the value your organization can generate from them, the IT asset lifecycle should be proactively managed. While each organization may define unique stages of that lifecycle. IT asset lifecycle starts from the time the request for purchase is made and ends after a device is deprecated, then disposed. Organizations have their unique asset procurement, maintenance, and disposal policies. You need to frame an asset life cycle to cover all stages of an asset in your organization. Each asset stage can have one or more states associated with it.

•  Request for an asset: The lifecycle begins when a service request is raised by a user or a department.
  
•  Approval: After the initiation of an asset request, if the required asset is in stock and the asset request is approved.
  

• Procurement: If the asset is not in stock, a purchase request is created and sent for approval. Once the approval is done, the asset is then purchased/leased.
  

• Deployment: The procured asset is installed in the IT environment.
  

• Usage: The asset is then assigned to a user and moved to the In-use state.
  

• Storage: If the asset needs to be repaired or is not currently in use, it is placed in storage.
  

• Expiration: The lifecycle ends once the asset gets expired or depreciated.
  

• Disposal: IT team makes the decision based on the organization policy to either dispose or reuse the asset.
  

 Automating these processes can reduce waste and repetitive tasks that bloat asset costs.

Define your critical IT assets:

When it comes to maintaining industrial equipment efficiently, it’s important that to prioritize those assets that are the most critical for the operation of any business. The CMDB is one of the core components of the ITAM tool, CMDB can give a grip over IT in handling critical assets, as a first step IT teams need to identify the business-critical CIs of the organization. Next, grouping them into appropriate CI Types(Assets, Business, and IT Services). Each CI Type holds its own attributes and relationships, any impact caused by the malfunctioning of these CIs on other CIs can be identified using the Relationship Map, and specific measures can be adapted to minimize the effect. Apart from handling critical assets, CMDB plays a vital role in handling Impact analysis, and in Root cause determination.