IT hygiene - hardware assets

In my experience, one of the hardest items to manage in IT are IT hardware assets. I am referring here to the core items in any business which are laptops, phones, tablets, monitors and accessories, all the way up to printers, servers, switches and firewalls (which I hope you don't manage anymore as you have moved to the cloud).

The foundation to having a good IT asset management process is to have an IT asset registry. Every IT hardware asset purchased needs to receive an asset tag and the information has to be entered in an asset registry. You don't need to make this task overly complex by capturing too much information, but at the very least have a bar scanner that can scan the serial number and asset tag fast and then enter the type of device, when it was purchased, who it was assigned to, the status (e.g. In Store, Assigned, In Repair, etc.) and what make and model it is in the registry. Once you have 'taken the item in stock', managing that stock and marking all outbound and inbound activity, replenishing in when it gets low, refreshing the stock through a life cycle management program when devices get old, managing hardware that's lost, damaged or stolen and shipments constitute a full e-commerce activity within the IT department and sometimes with a high stake given that these items are high in value and you can end up managing 100s of thousands of dollars if not more in IT hardware.

I will spend more time on the asset registry component and the role of an asset manager belonging to one person. I would advise that any hardware movements and therefore changes to the registry are done through one person rather than everyone touching stock and the registry. The activity is error prone and much more likely to go wrong if you have a whole team taking hardware in and out of stock as opposed to one person being the gatekeeper. Choose carefully who that person is and make sure they are organized and detail oriented as well as have a standard operating process for how assets need to be handled, so that the function can be reassigned in the team.

Once the IT hardware has been received and inventoried, it is common for businesses to deploy a company image of an operating system and a set of applications before assigning it to an employee. That is another area where things can go wrong because even if this process is not done manually (e.g. you can provision devices automatically through something like Microsoft Intune and everyone gets the same image with the apps), if the IT technician doesn't then configure the apps or have the account of the employee configured in the apps, it usually creates rework down the track when the employee receives the asset and not a good employee experience. I don't know about you, but one of the first things I look at a potential employer is their attention to the onboarding process and what choices of IT hardware they make. If the process is smooth and the quality of the IT equipment is good with minimum back and forth with IT, then that serves as an indication of a company or at least IT department that have got their processes right. Don't try and save on IT hardware because they are the workhorse of your business. Go for the known brands, over spec them if you can, don't buy bricks weighing 5 pounds thinking they are sturdy, as no office worker will appreciate carrying that back and forth, buy a sleek design laptop, with touch screen, buy an iPhone and iPad not an Android as corporate world is used with Apple products more than Android and they tend to be more user friendly.

Once your devices are in the wild, and you apply software updates periodically, you will have to deal with return of equipment through departures, lost and stolen items. For departures, the asset registry will be critical in ticking off that every item given to an employee has been taken back and depending on the state of the item, it can go back in the fleet to someone else after it's reimaged. For broken items, partner with a repair shop rather than having your team being the mechanic and decide if the cost of repair is worth based on the age of the device/value remaining on books. As you give out equipment constantly, you always need to have stock available. During Covid, the supply chain delays saw our laptop orders waiting for 6 months and we used to order much more than needed due to this reason. I hope that will not happen again, but you always need to have spares around and check your stock to replenish.

Every hardware asset has a certain lifecycle that comes with it. I recommend replacing laptops every 3-4 years depending on the model and phones or tablets every 2-3 years. The sooner the better of course, but it is a big capital expenditure to do so. After that time the devices become slow, they are out of warranty and it becomes a much harder job to offer a good service. For any IT equipment that you retire, you need to go through a decommissioning process to ensure no corporate data is left there. Partner with an accredited party that can take the stock from you and offer a certificate of destruction.

The last piece of advice here is to audit your IT stock periodically. You don't want to have surprises with equipment gone missing or incorrect information. The more you check it, the less wrong things can happen.