3 Pillars of CDW’s Targeted Approach to IT Asset Management

IT asset management (ITAM) is a set of processes and tools that help organizations manage their assets on an ongoing basis. The ongoing nature of ITAM plays an important role in the practice. Many organizations have a misconception that ITAM projects have a start date and an end date. The reality is that business and IT environments are always changing, and organizations need a strategy that allows them to manage that change. 

That’s where ITAM comes in, with the goals of optimizing costs, increasing visibility into the IT environment and establishing controls for that environment. Many organizations also pursue ITAM to improve their licensing compliance and contract management.

Our services address the components on which a successful, long-term ITAM practice depends: people, processes, technology, communication and continuous improvement. We emphasize communication because it’s not enough for an ITAM strategy to simply yield good data. Organizations also need a strategy to share that information so it can drive business decisions.

In-depth discovery sessions with our customers are integral to our service. We seek to understand not only the IT environment but also the business drivers behind it. For instance, what are the organization’s goals? What are current processes? What kind of features or tools are leaders looking for?

Obtaining the right data and insights is the first step. From there, we help our customers understand a more strategic approach by providing recommendations that address short- and long-term priorities. Our work is iterative and agile to ensure that as industry and organizational priorities change, we adapt our approach too.

The most effective ITAM strategies consider the complete technological ecosystem: software, hardware and Software as a Service. A holistic solution takes into account everything within the IT purview that will require management or needs to be considered from a compliance perspective. 

Similarly, we take a broad view of the relationship between IT and the rest of the business. We help organizations align multiple aspects of their business — including procurement, finance and other areas — to ensure that decisions don’t happen in a vacuum.

We also understand that priorities shift. That’s one reason we design our short-term engagements to have long-term potential. Even when a customer seeks to address only one portion of an asset management strategy, we want to set up that customer to advance that strategy whenever desired.

As with everything else in business, partnerships are key. We have been highly selective in the technology platforms and service providers we work with. With the former, we emphasize clean, digestible data. We want to ensure that organizations don’t have to spend their time parsing unstructured information and trying to figure out what they have.

The diversity of our partnerships also enables us to recommend the right tools — and customize the right services — for each organization’s size and unique needs. 

Our ITAM services include project-based engagements, maturity and risk assessments, technology platform consultations, and ongoing support services.

Story by:

David Comings, the solutions manager for IT asset management at CDW. He is responsible for the vision, sales strategy and operation of CDW’s IT Asset Management practice.

Rosann Parra, a senior IT asset manager specialist at CDW. She is responsible for selling software asset management solutions to customers, as well as managing customer SAM engagements — from the initial customer contact to planning, data collection and reconciliation and the presentation of the final plan to the customer.

Randi Coughlin, a senior IT asset management solution architect for CDW.