Integrating ITAM and ITSM: A Strategic Necessity for Modern Business

Your IT department is running like a well-oiled machine: service requests are handled in just a couple of hours, service availability is consistently above 99%, and your users are happy. But every month, your CFO still wants to know why the IT budget is growing faster than the rest of the business. Your ITSM system brought order to your processes, but it never answered the main question: what does all this order actually cost, and can we spend less without sacrificing quality?

My name is Evgenia, and I'm the Product Owner for SimpleOne ITAM. Let's talk about why companies that have already implemented an ITSM system should also think about automating their IT asset management, and how that combination can give their business a serious boost.

ITSM and Its Benefits

In recent years, more and more companies have realized they need to manage their IT in a structured way, not just by reacting to problems as they pop up. They're starting to see IT as a full-fledged set of services that support the entire business. This shift from "reactive" user support to well-defined processes has become a natural sign of a mature IT department.

This is usually the point where ITSM (IT Service Management) comes into the picture. It's an approach that helps build a transparent, predictable, and manageable way of delivering IT services, covering everything from an employee's help desk ticket to planning major changes in the company's infrastructure.

The ITSM approach is based on the practices of ITIL 4 — a well-known methodology consisting of 34 different practices. Companies can pick and choose the ones they need to manage their IT services effectively. The classic, almost universal processes include managing IT services, incidents, problems, configurations, changes, and the knowledge base.

But what a business needs goes beyond just automating IT service delivery. Once you have an ITSM system in place, you can start thinking about automating the processes of other departments to become even more efficient. But it’s important to remember that ITSM only solves part of the puzzle, and saving money isn't its main job. That's where another practice comes in: IT asset management.

What is ITAM?

ITAM (IT Asset Management) is one of the ITIL 4 practices, but it's often left out of standard ITSM solutions. The focus of this practice is the complete lifecycle of an asset: planning, procurement, operation, and disposal. When we were creating our SimpleOne ITAM solution, we made sure to remember that ITAM is different from configuration management. Not every asset is a configuration item, and not every configuration item is an asset.

A configuration item (CI) is what you need to deliver a service. It could be any part of a service that you need to manage — a server, a document, or even a person. IT admins need to know where everything is, what rack the server is in, and how the infrastructure is set up. With ITSM, the cost of keeping that CI running is less important; the main focus is on making sure the IT service is delivered with high quality.

An asset, on the other hand, is all about tracking costs and who is responsible for it. With asset management, the finance team can see how much the company is spending on IT resources, where valuable items are, and who is in charge of them. The technical details needed to deliver a service are less of a focus here.

SimpleOne ITAM uses common CMDB classes and models, as well as REM-attribute collections to store variable asset attributes. This structure allows for a seamless integration with your ITSM processes.

ITAM is all about the financial side of things: accounting, identifying components, and controlling costs for IT resources. This practice covers processes like:

• Planning budget limits for maintaining your IT infrastructure;
• Gathering people’s needs and reserving stock inventory;
• Planning and approving purchases;
• Day-to-day asset tracking — inventory checks, transfers, and storage;
• Making sure you're compliant with software licenses and regulations;
• Managing supplier contracts;
• Analyzing how assets are being used and finding ways to reuse them;
• Decommissioning and disposing of old assets.

Although ITSM and ITAM handle different tasks, they aren't interchangeable. It's their combination that brings real benefits to your business and your employees — and that's what we'll dive into next.

Why Your Business is Losing Money Without an ITSM and ITAM Integration

From everything we've talked about, it's clear that an IT director really needs both. Without ITSM automation, your business could grind to a halt because of system failures or missing features. But without adding ITAM, your company is likely overspending and has no real control over its resources.

ITSM optimizes how you deliver IT services — it tells you where incidents are happening, what needs to be changed, and which configurations are supporting your business processes. ITAM adds the financial layer to this picture: how much each resource costs, where it is, who's responsible for it, and when its service contract is up. When you bring these two together, you start to see the connections. For example, when a server crashes, you don't just see the technical details needed to fix it; you also see the financial impact: is it still under warranty? Do we need to plan for a replacement? Are there any spares in storage?

When these systems work separately, the procurement department doesn't know the actual workload of the assets. A request for a new server gets approved, even though there's a perfectly good one sitting in a closet that the admins aren't using. With an integration, the data from your ITSM shows you the real workload on your equipment and how often it fails. The data from your ITAM shows you what resources you have available and what they're worth. So, instead of buying a new server, the company just reallocates an existing one — saving money and getting the problem solved faster.

For a manager, this integration provides a whole new level of clarity. ITSM gives you service metrics: incident response time, percentage of successful changes, system availability. ITAM gives you financial numbers: operating expenses, capital expenditures, total cost of ownership of assets. When you link this data, you see the real, complete picture.

Bringing these approaches together also improves the user experience. If an employee needs a new monitor, the old way could be a long and winding road: they submit a request in the ITSM system → their manager approves it → the request is sent to procurement → someone checks for availability in a spreadsheet → the issuance is processed → the records are updated in a different system. With an ITSM+ITAM integration, the process is cut down to almost nothing: when the request comes in, the system automatically checks for asset availability in storage via ITAM, reserves it, creates a task for someone to hand it out, and updates who's responsible for it and where it's located. 

That's three automatic steps, with almost no manual work. The company handles requests faster, and employees spend less time on administrative tasks.

The interaction between ITSM and ITAM helps optimize management and make cost control more transparent because you start to see the full price tag of your solutions. 

When your service and asset data are connected, every decision is made with an understanding of its financial impact: should we buy new or reuse what we have? Upgrade now or wait? Which assets are causing the most problems and eating up our maintenance budget? It also becomes much easier to see cause and effect. The cost of maintaining a particular service is no longer just an abstract number; it's tied to specific, aging assets.