Let’s say you have a sales team of 16. Janie has a laptop, a phone, a desktop, and an old iPad she scrounged from an intern’s desk for a one-time need. Jamal has two phones (don’t ask), one new and one “broken” laptop, and keeps insisting he needs a desktop even though he’s never in the office. Ron, on the other hand, is something of a Luddite, uses an old flip-phone he owns himself, and barely does his reporting at all—let alone on his laptop.
Do any of these people sound familiar? Are you in an office or lab like this? Your company, presumably, owns these assets (and a pretty vast number of others), paid for them, and is (or ought to) managing them. But who’s really doing that? Who’s putting on the IT inventory hat to keep up with an unending, ever-changing landscape?
Historically, most of the IT assets rested within an organization’s domain. However, now with a boom in remote work and the lessons from Covid, the challenges of managing IT assets have multiplied. Hardware has left the building and new apps and services multiply. One of the biggest challenges with the proliferation of services and technology is that assets often get tracked in a lot of different places by a lot of different people. Often, no single person owns everything, let alone has visibility into all the systems. And without the right tools in place, no single platform collects and centralizes asset data across your organization. How can you make informed decisions without a clear picture? This is where a robust solution is critical. Your boss’ Excel spreadsheet is not a robust solution, by the way.
It’s worth noting here that many organizations don’t merely have a need for better asset management–they have a mandate. Recently in New York state, a school district was audited for its inability to locate any number of pieces of hardware. In this case, at least, they had tools in place, but used them inefficiently. Many organizations simply do not know what assets they own, what shape they’re in, or where they’re located.
The good news is that implementing a system for robust asset management doesn’t have to be either complicated or costly. Request Tracker is a widely supported, open source asset tracking system, among other things. You and your team can confidently know what assets you have, who has your assets, and where your assets are—all from one place. You can even easily import your boss’ Excel spreadsheet! With options for email and self-service portals and built-in reporting, you could even build a documentation culture! Imagine that! Anyone can play along!
One of the most powerful advantages to using Request Tracker (RT) is that it’s almost infinitely customizable. You get to set up an asset management system that works for you. As always, and unlike other products in the market today, RT never gates its features. Your team gets every feature there is right out of the box. Also, being open source, there are no per seat charges. RT scales at your pace.
Perhaps best of all? Request Tracker offers a free trial so that you can spend actual time in a fully-functioning program. See how your team can explore new asset tracking capabilities with Request Tracker.