Analyst firm, Gartner Research has established that most IT departments spend 80 percent of their budget keeping the lights on, routinely maintaining their day-to-day operations, leaving only a fifth of their IT spend still available for adding value and delivering innovation to the business.

This 80:20 rule is a hard habit to break for many organisations. Those that do manage to free themselves out of their 80:20 shackles and take that ratio closer to 70:30 by managing assets more effectively are the ones that are gaining a competitive advantage.

Keeping track of IT assets is a necessary but tedious bureaucratic chore that most organisations would rather avoid. Yet given the critical importance of IT assets to the business, effective resource tracking is a task that can’t be avoided.