RPA+AI: Open the Blind Area of IT Asset Management

IT asset management is an important part of business management, but it is easy to be ignored, which has become a management blind area for many enterprises.According to Gartner research, currently, less than 25% of the global companies have appropriate IT asset management plans. Most companies (especially large state-owned enterprises and traditional enterprises) still use complex manual tracking and monitoring methods. Some companies do not know their IT asset base, which leads to the loss of time, capital and system performance.

What is IT asset management?

IT assets mainly refer to the hardware, software and information assets owned by enterprises or organizations that can bring value to the business. As an important part of IT management and its governance, its asset management (ITAM) can help organizations improve the utilization of IT assets more effectively, avoid unnecessary asset procurement, ensure software compliance, thus reducing IT costs, reducing IT risks, and maximizing IT asset return. The level of IT asset management is directly related to the value of IT applications and the level of IT services. However, because the management process involves many departments, such as technology, finance, procurement, etc., it not only consumes a lot of manpower and time, but also easily leads to data errors caused by human errors. Nowadays, many enterprises have begun to seek IT asset management solutions that combine RPA and AI.

RPA performs redundant tasks to improve efficiency

The implementation of RPA will reduce the workload and cost of IT asset management. The robot can work efficiently 24 hours a day, and the processing speed is more than 8 times of that of human, and it can hardly make mistakes, which can effectively avoid mistakes caused by human operation.

Flexible expansion capability and “non-invasive” enable RPA to integrate across departments in multiple application systems, and automate cumbersome processes. In case of any problem, the robot will immediately report an error to ensure that IT asset management gets timely feedback from all departments. RPA is a good assistant for analysts. It can replace them to perform redundant tasks, reduce workload, and give analysts more energy to make more informed decisions, so as to reduce the cost of purchasing IT assets.

AI makes unstructured data management more “digital”

Software or hardware asset applications often require other legal processes to process approvals, signatures, contract negotiations, license modifications, and clarifications. The tasks related to these processes include unstructured data or images in e-mail, voice mail, and chat robots. At this time, RPA alone is not enough, but also need to use AI for unstructured data management. RPA can transfer unstructured raw data to AI, which processes the data and sends the results back to RPA. RPA then links the results to the appropriate IT asset execution process. This enables fast processing of service requests from chat robots, email, and voice mail.

RPA + AI make it compliance audit more accurate

Its asset audits ensure that businesses comply with software license agreements and regulations. In order to ensure compliance, enterprises should conduct self-audit regularly. But it often takes a lot of time and resources. Many enterprises have no comprehensive IT asset management, which makes it difficult for them to conduct self-audit, so they can only rely on the audit report put forward by the external auditor. Its asset management combined with RPA + AI can minimize or eliminate the manual redundant tasks in the process of enterprise self-audit.

In this way, internal auditors can focus more time and energy on the analysis results, help them grow into analysts, and provide more valuable insights for enterprises.