As corporate purse strings get increasingly tightened in this period of downturn, the need for organisations to perform IT fixed asset tracking is becoming more of a priority.This is usually the responsibility of the IT department.I spoke to a number of IT department managers in various businesses and organizations to find out how they deal with IT asset tracking.

Spreadsheets
fixed asset register] information in a giant spreadsheet.  It basically works a little like this. The initial spreadsheet is built up with a manual audit of every piece of equipment and software in the company.  The common details that are tracked are date of purchase, make and model, serial number, warranty info, location and name of user.  New purchases of hardware and software are then added to the spreadsheet as and when they occur. As with many manual business functions, the spreadsheet’s downfall is that it doesn’t scale well at all.For larger businesses the spreadsheet can become extremely complicated.  The spreadsheet system also doesn’t react very well to changes, such as breakdowns, warranty uses, change of staff and software license expiration.You can imagine the fragility of a system that requires the constant attention of one very thorough person.

RFID & Asset Barcoding
Asset barcodes have been around for a while and are step up from manual data entry – each asset is given a specific barcode which stores all the relevant information from the asset register.A handheld barcode scanner is generally used to scan these asset tags, so that information can quickly and efficiently be obtained an update during regular asset audits. RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, goes one step beyond traditional barcoding because they allow you to perform a hardware audit without physically scanning each asset. More importantly, RFID tracking allows greater flexibility for increasingly mobile equipment such as laptops and PDAs.

Fixed Asset Management Software
There are a good choice of semi-automated and customized asset management software solutions which take a lot of the pain out of the process. I have come across some companies who have created their own custom asset database using SQL and linking this to the intranet to allow multi-user administration. At the other end of the scale there is specialist asset management software which covers all the fixed assets of the organisation, including things such as vehicles, containers, property and machinery as well as IT assets.  There are also specially designed solutions to meet the growing plethora of asset accounting and tax regulations that companies need to meet – such as compliance with Sarbanes Oxley. The beauty of this integrated approach is it combines the needs of several departments including IT, accounting and management, to allow for a larger budget and amore robust solution. 

I’d certainly be interested to hear what methods your organization uses to track IT assets and whether you have any novel approaches.