IT Asset Management Roles & Responsibilities - Who To Hire First
As the ITAM lead at your organization, you may be a one-person show right now. But as your needs grow, you’ll need to bring on more people. If you ask anyone who’s done it, it’s not easy to build an ITAM team – and it’s even harder to build a successful team. Not only is there a lack of qualified and experienced folks out there to hire, but often when you find a good hire, placing that person in the proper role can be highly challenging. That’s why you need to have your IT asset management roles and responsibilities well-defined before building your team.
As someone hired by companies and organizations to consult with and coach their ITAM teams, I’m intimately familiar with the roadblocks that undermine success. Many companies have built their teams with the right people but then put them in the wrong roles. Conflict is the result that undermines the goals of trustworthy data, verified asset lifecycle data and data optimization.
So, to help you out, I’ve put together a list of IT asset management roles and responsibilities that should help you structure your staff with the ideal people for each position right from the start.
Core IT Asset Management Roles & Responsibilities
1. Direct Hires
- Data Analyst: Your data analyst will be responsible for data entry and verification by way of your discovery tool. They will be in charge of alignment reporting, verifying, and updating asset lifecycle flags and optimizing license position reporting by way of the Database Integrity Quotient (DbIQ) reporting. If yours is a large organization, your data analyst(s) may be able to divide the work in ways that make sense, such as hardware versus software, end-user versus server versus SaaS, and so on.
- ITAM Single Point of Contact (SPOC): Your SPOC will be primarily concerned with providing expert information and education on ITAM concerns to their fellow employees, software publisher account representatives, and license auditors. Project managers will turn to your ITAM SPOCs with questions about how hardware and software impact their programs. SPOCs are the folks who will warn the IT Finance group when more software licenses need to be purchased and track who needs to buy them.
- And your SPOC will be the point person when the inevitable software audits occur. If your organization is large, you can divide their roles across software publishers so they cultivate deep knowledge about specific publishers.
- Team Lead/Manager: As your team grows, you’ll need to put someone in place whose role will be to manage human assets more than IT assets. Your team leader/manager should be focused on creating and maintaining an environment where the rest of the team can do their work without friction.
- Interviewing, hiring, and training team members are part of the team leader/manager’s role, as well as authoring, negotiating, and enforcing ITAM policies, standards, and procedures. This is the person who will represent the ITAM team to your business’ leadership and other towers. Regardless of how big your team is, there should only be one team lead/manager.
Indirect hires are what I like to refer to as dotted line connectors. They are part of other teams but will be working so closely with your ITAM team that it is going to feel as if they are part of your team. You must consider them, as well, as you refine your IT asset management roles & responsibilities.
- SysAdmin(s) of the Discovery Tools: This will be someone from cyber security, networking, service management or someone from HR or identity access management. They will regularly meet with the ITAM team and have accountability and responsibility to the ITAM team lead/manager.
- SysAdmin of the CMDB or Asset MDR: It’s natural to assume this person would be part of the asset management team, but in reality, this person will already be a part of service management, controlling the help desk, ticketing system, and the like.
- However, if the SysAdmin for the CMDB or asset MDR is part of your team, make sure they have a different role than the folks doing data analysis. There’s a big difference between running the tool (and making sure it’s properly cared for) and using it to ensure the data is being carefully managed.
Conclusion
Conflict comes up when team members step on other team members’ toes because they’re trying to do part of their job. I’m a big believer that good fences make for good neighbors. Detailed IT asset management roles and responsibilities make for good team members.
If yours is a small organization, you’ll likely have more than one person wearing each hat. But, if your organization is a large enterprise, the above should be separate roles. Either way, when hiring, keep your goals at the top of your mind: trustworthy data, verified asset lifecycle data and data optimization.
