That’s where IT Asset Management (ITAM) comes in. Your organization can find itself in a chaotic mess of lost hardware, ghost software, and unnecessary purchases without a structured IT Asset Management lifecycle.
Yes, I know that defining a big range of IT assets’ lifecycles is easier said than done. We witness on a daily basis that many companies struggle to automate reporting and processing because they don’t have a clear framework in place. Instead of that, they rely on manual tracking, which is time-consuming and prone to errors or basic human oversight.
The key to making ITAM work is understanding where each asset is in its lifecycle and guaranteeing that every stage is managed with precision and accountability.
What if IT assets could report back to a central system, signaling their current status (and actually with today’s technology, they really can)? That would eliminate so many blind spots and inefficiencies.
Let’s break down what a well-defined IT Asset Management lifecycle should look like and why it matters.
IT Asset Management Lifecycle Explained
The IT asset management lifecycle is a business practice to manage IT assets from acquisition to disposal. It includes every stage an IT asset goes through from the moment it is procured to when it is retired or repurposed.
Proper lifecycle management ensures that your organization is able to make full use of the IT investments, lower risks at a minimum, and perform well while maintaining compliance and security.
In addition to tracking devices and software lifecycles, IT asset lifecycle management needs you to plan, monitor, and govern the process to make sure that your IT assets serve their intended purpose. When done right, it helps your business reduce IT waste (and costs) significantly and help you improve asset utilization (which even contributes to your business being more sustainable!).
Stages of Asset Lifecycle Management
The IT Asset Lifecycle follows a structured path, moving through five core stages:
- Procured
- Inventoried
- Installed
- Recovered
- Disposed
Each of these stages is equally exclusive, meaning an asset can’t exist in multiple states at once.
1. Procured: Bringing Assets into the Fold
This is where an IT Asset first enters your business. Whether it’s a laptop, server, or software license, procurement is the moment when money has been exchanged, and the asset now belongs to your company. At this point, the asset is nothing more than a record in a purchase order or tracking system. If it suddenly pops up on the network before it’s officially received and documented, that’s a red flag, someone might have skipped a step.
2. Inventoried: The Waiting Room
Once the asset arrives, it needs to be documented and prepared for use. This stage ensures that the asset has been received, logged into the IT asset management system, and made ready for deployment. Whether it’s sitting in a warehouse or undergoing configuration, this is the phase where IT ensures everything is accounted for before the asset moves to an active role. If an asset is missing from inventory records but is already in use, it means tracking protocols have failed somewhere along the way.
3. Installed: The Workhorse Stage
At this point, the asset is in the hands of users or actively contributing to IT operations.
For hardware, this means it’s powered on, assigned to a user or department, and actively communicating with the network. For software, it means licenses are assigned, and users are interacting with it.
This stage is where IT needs visibility for tracking asset performance, monitoring compliance, and ensuring proper usage. If an asset goes silent (ex: no logins, no network activity), it could mean it’s unused or abandoned (or (sigh!)... lost/stolen), making it a prime candidate for reassignment or retirement, or taking another action that your organization has decided on earlier.
4. Recovered: The Second Chance
Assets don’t always go straight from being active to being retired. Sometimes they’re pulled from circulation but still hold value. Maybe a laptop is returned after an employee leaves, or a server is taken offline for upgrades.
This stage exists to differentiate assets that are out of service temporarily versus those that are permanently decommissioned. If recovered assets are piling up in storage without a plan for redeployment, the business is essentially sitting on wasted capital.
5. Disposed: The End of the Line
Finally, we reach the last stop. An asset that is disposed of is no longer the organization’s concern. It has been sold, recycled, donated, or destroyed.
At this stage, assets should have clear documentation proving their removal from the business. If an asset is marked as disposed but is still connected to the network, something has gone very, very wrong.
Similarly, software should be uninstalled, and any linked licenses should be reclaimed or retired.
Taking ITIL guidelines, and our IT asset lifecycle management best practices for managing IT assets as inspiration, here are some suggestions to implement in your IT Asset Lifecycle Management to make sure you get the best out of it:
- Make sure that you’re logging and registering every single new IT asset (be it software or hardware) in your ITAM software, and implementing automated asset lifecycle management workflows to reduce manual errors throughout the lifecycle of your assets.
- Make sure that you’re regularly auditing IT assets.
- Make sure that you establish clear policies for procurement, deployment, maintenance, and disposal AND your entire organization is fully aware of it and that it is a part of your employee contracts.
- Make sure that you’re continuously challenging your organization to find new ways to improve asset usage to be on top of asset ROI and to keep costs at a minimum.
- Make sure that you’re finding opportunities to reuse / reassign IT assets to keep your operations as green as possible.
How to Set Up an IT Asset Management Process Workflow
When getting started with building a workflow to manage your IT assets’ lifecycle, you need structure, sequences and steps. Based on our experience with IT asset management, we recommend the following workflow for a headache-free approach:
- Plan and budget on a periodical way (yearly, quarterly, monthly, etc.) . You know your IT asset needs & how to plan them the best. Make sure to factor these in during your planning and budgeting periods to align your needs better with your finance department before you make purchases.
- Carefully assign assets to users and services to make sure they’re correctly configured and monitored. It is always good to get a second eye in this process, so make sure to ask for help from your team if you’re the only one assigning assets to users to get everything right.
- Set up asset optimization blockers on your calendar (weekly, monthly, etc.) to remind yourself to track asset performance & usage level, as well as updates and upgrades to stay on top of the whole asset lifecycle & usage funnel. This will help you retire outdated assets, reclaim unused or underused software assets and reassign them to colleagues who can make better use of them, and dispose of to-be-retired IT hardware equipment in a more timely and sustainable way.
Are you struggling to plan your IT budget? Read practical tips from ALVAO! Guide: How to create an IT budget that meets the real needs of the business.
Key Takeaways
Instead of reacting to asset lifecycle events, you need to move towards a more proactive approach. As we discussed throughout this article, the benefits of being on top of your IT asset management lifecycle processes are very straightforward: better cost control, compliance, efficiency, and ease of mind.
In the future, we know that AI will take care of more and more IT asset management tasks, and automate hefty day-to-day tasks to make your team's lives easier with predictive analytics. For now, ensure you have a good ITAM lifecycle strategy with these strategies we shared above to use your IT assets while they’re around.
Want to see ALVAO in action? Get in touch with our consultants today!