As enterprises seek better visibility into their IT asset landscape using CMDBs, IT teams struggle with a foundational problem: data accuracy.
When every team–IT, finance, security, and HR–has their own systems of record that contain conflicting data points, it’s nearly impossible to get everyone on the same page. Add in that many systems, even within single departments, don’t talk to each other and often require heavy manual work to maintain, and enterprise IT teams are left with a jumbled mess of inaccurate, outdated, and redundant IT asset data that prevents them from leveraging that information in strategic decisions.
Only by improving data accuracy and gaining full visibility into the entire asset lifecycle can IT leaders turn their asset landscape into a strategic advantage and partner with cross-functional teams to drive automation, improve security, and increase cost savings.
In this blog, we’ll look at:
- The role that accurate IT data plays in asset management and core business functions
- How IT leaders can bolster existing asset management investments with tools that deliver increased visibility and governance
How Does Data Accuracy Affect IT Asset Management?
Accurate IT asset data is foundational for security, patching, cost management, and lifecycle management within IT asset management (ITAM). Having accurate asset data also allows IT teams to show their competency and the impact of their efforts to enterprise leaders who are looking for proof that investments are bringing value to the business.
As Vishal Gupta, CIO + CTO at Lexmark, put it in our recent webinar: “If your data is not accurate, it’s a real problem and a real opportunity.”
Your IT asset data should allow you to easily and quickly answer pertinent questions like:
- What lifecycle stage is this asset in?
- Who owns this asset?
- Where is this asset’s current location?
- What operating system is this asset on?
- How will I patch this asset?
- When is the asset due for refresh or retirement?
If you can’t answer these questions without running to half a dozen systems (and taking hours to days to do so), it’s time to invest in a solution that gets you better data.
What Standards Should I Have for Data Quality?
When you're trying to determine what level of data accuracy you need to support your IT operations and the overall business, it's always wise to have standards to meet.
These can include:
- A Baseline of Lifecycle Visibility: Can you see across the entire asset lifecycle?
- The Overall User Experience: How easy is it to provide service-level support for device detection?
- The Ability to Manage Software Subscriptions: Can you understand and manage subscriptions without allowing for waste?
As she shared on our recent webinar, Amy Doucette, VP of Technology and Digital Transformation at MVM, always keeps one standard in mind: “Making sure we truly understand all the assets that we're managing.”
You might be thinking you already have decent data. You have a CMDB that houses all your asset information. Well, here’s the thing…
Is My CMDB Accurate?
In many cases, unfortunately, no. CMDBs are great tools for storing IT asset information, but they come with a few downsides–namely that they’re:
- Static
- Ticket-centric
- Often filled with duplicates or redundancies
Almost as soon as you update it, something in your asset environment changes, and the data becomes outdated. On top of that, CMDBs are typically limited to operational, active devices. They don’t account for off-network assets in pre- or post-network lifecycle stages such as forecasting, procurement, supply chain/in-transit, and decommissioning.
So, no. Your CMDB is likely not accurate–but it can be with the right ITAM tools.
That’s especially important when you consider the role accurate IT asset data plays in different fundamental pillars of your organization, including any automation initiatives you plan on undertaking.
What Role Does Data Accuracy Play in AI And Automation?
Clean, accurate asset data can be your competitive advantage or your downfall. Reliable data produces good outcomes that support productivity and velocity within ITAM. Bad data leads to poor outcomes that not only slow you down but can also create new risks.
As enterprises continue to increase their technology investments, manually managing the millions of data points within IT asset landscapes is all but impossible. It’s not because people lack the ability to process that information or that they’re negligent. There’s just too much information for someone to take in and interpret.
AI–whether generative, agentic, or otherwise–addresses that challenge by reading, analyzing, and offering predictions on that data to increase velocity around decisions that data impacts–so long as the AI is operating using accurate data.
How Does Inaccurate Data Impact Automation?
When you plug inaccurate, incomplete IT asset data into AI-powered automation workflows, you risk:
- Hallucinations: The data produces outputs or answers that look plausible but are incorrect.
- Wrong Results: Automations can act counterintuitively to what you intended them to do.
- Loss of Trust: If your AI produces poor results because of bad data, your team and leadership alike can lose trust in the technology and hesitate to put more money or resources behind it.
- Increased Costs: You have to spend more time and resources fixing the mistakes that bad data caused.
On the other hand...
How Does Accurate Asset Data Support Automation?
Accurate IT asset data empowers you to build AI workflows and automations within your ITAM that support:
- Software License Management: Identify what licenses are being used, and by whom, retire non-used licenses, and defend invoices.
- Device Location: Automate GPS tracking in mobile devices to pinpoint asset details and improve user safety and security.
- Compliance Reporting: Immediately know if your assets are compliant with applicable regulations, and spot gaps to understand why they are or aren't.
- Cost Savings: Use AI workflows to automate device reclamation, limit waste, and reduce overbuying to create more budget.
You want to establish achievable targets and ensure you’re getting value from your efforts, as with any initiative you invest money and resources in.
What Targets Should I Track To Prove Successful AI Automation?
The targets you set to track the impact of your automation efforts will vary based on your overall ITAM goals.
However, these give you a good jumping-off point.
- Maintain Best-in-Class IT Operations: Use automated workflows and AI-powered processes to enhance existing IT investments and increase your level of excellence.
- Streamline Audit Preparation: Increasingly use automation to cut down on audit prep times and improve compliance reporting efforts.
- Improve Financial Budgeting: Improve forecasting and cost savings as automated processes help you take advantage of the entire asset lifecycle.
- Reduce Drift: Once you get your ITAM processes in a good place, leverage AI to ensure they don't shift backwards over time.
For all the power that data accuracy holds in automation efforts, having an accurate, complete view of your IT assets across their full lifecycle also has a major impact on security and risk.
How Does Data Accuracy Impact IT Security?
When you have good data, you know everything about your security posture. There’s no guessing or hidden areas of vulnerability.
That includes external risks like:
- Endpoint visibility
- Security certificate positions
- BitSight security ratings and other security scorecards
- Regulatory risks
That data also covers the lesser-tracked data points like shadow IT and supply chain vulnerabilities. These typically fall outside the traditional security purview monitoring active, on-the-wire devices, an area we call The Overlooked Perimeter.
How Does Data Accuracy Improve Security Position?
When you have accurate IT asset data to use within your security processes–data that gives you a single-pane view of every asset in every lifecycle stage–it changes the way you can approach protecting your business.
Better data accuracy means:
- Stronger Audit Trails: Know exactly where and when an asset moves throughout its lifecycle to minimize operational risk and strengthen defensibility.
- Easier Compliance Reporting: Provide regulatory authorities, like those in charge of NYDFS, GDPR, and NIST, with access to the data they need during audits or investigations.
- Faster Response Times: Immediately understand your asset environment to quickly address incidents as soon as they occur.
Having a complete, accurate view of your IT landscape also reduces the risk of security breaches in non-traditional lifecycle stages.
A real-world example: modern attackers shipped laptops containing malware directly to a company’s loading dock. The company did exactly what the attacker expected and immediately provisioned them into the environment. If they had complete visibility into every lifecycle stage, that risk could have been eliminated by comparing procurement information with the shipment and realizing the data didn’t match.
As Robert Potter, CEO of Oomnitza, says, speaking of the way attack agents are becoming more sophisticated:
“These types of attacks are happening, they’re real. Having an asset management technology that has high reliability of data and has the ability to look at your entire lifecycle, it absolutely plays a role in security and having a better risk profile in your environment.”
Accurate insight into the entire asset lifecycle also makes a positive impact on the bottom line.
Does Better Asset Data Solve Financial Challenges?
It absolutely does. In a decentralized environment, enterprises have countless applications, licenses, and devices that are increasingly difficult to track and manage.
By improving the data accuracy of those devices, IT teams can:
- Remove Unused Licenses: Identify what licenses are not being used and cancel unnecessary ones.
- Reclaim Devices: Easily know what devices a departing employee has and automate the reclamation process to refresh and recycle assets instead of buying more.
- Improve Budgets: Open up more budget as you gain better insight into existing hardware and software costs and reduce waste.
A key thing to remember here is that it is not just your IT team that uses this asset data. Other departments – like finance and HR – rely on it to make their decisions.
How Do Financial Executives Use IT Asset Data?
As you work to ensure your enterprise is using funds wisely, financial executives will have questions about the various assets used throughout the company and want to know that IT is making good use of the budget you’re given.
They can have questions related to:
- Endpoint refresh strategies
- Device forecasting and budgeting
- Areas of opportunity for repurposing or reallocating
Having access to accurate, complete asset data allows you to answer those questions without having to look at different systems and gives Finance the information they need to support decisions that impact IT and the larger enterprise.
When it’s clear that data accuracy has a huge impact on how IT and cross-functional teams support initiatives around security, compliance, cost management, and automation, it’s no surprise that many organizations are making the effort to improve their access to high-quality data. The matter then becomes how to do so.
How Can I Improve IT Asset Data Quality?
Getting better data accuracy comes down to getting a complete view of your asset lifecycle. If you cannot collect information and support the pillars of your business with your current tech stack, then you really should be reevaluating the technology you're investing in.
While many tools are not built for proper ITAM, solutions like Oomnitza deliver a unified, trusted view of your entire technology ecosystem. We bring IT, security, HR, and finance teams together on a single platform to show your entire inventory across hardware and software in your environment–and that delivers real results.
Vishal Gupta of Lexmark and his team couldn’t push their Mac patch rates above ~70%. The issue wasn't Jamf or their other security tools — it was a lack of visibility into Apple devices. Once they fixed the underlying IT asset data, clean records took them past 90%.
With Oomnitza, you get:
- Full visibility into assets, regardless of lifecycle phase
- Aggregated, normalized, and enriched data to ensure 98%+ accuracy across systems
- The ability to track software license usage and manage desktop & SaaS contracts
- Proactive identification of security gaps to stop attacks before they happen
- Cross-functional, automated workflows that keep everyone on the same page
- A single source of truth that empowers you to optimize AI investments
Want more research-backed information on the role data accuracy plays in enterprise ITAM? Read through this 6-page IDC Spotlight Paper.
Ready to eliminate data silos, achieve 98%+ asset accuracy, and automate cross-functional workflows? Reach out to our team about getting started with Oomnitza’s enterprise IT asset management.
