At its core, asset management involves the comprehensive tracking and oversight of an organization’s (largely technology) assets to optimize usage, reduce costs, and ensure compliance. In ServiceNow, the Asset Management platform serves as a centralized system for managing the physical, technological, contractual, and financial dimensions of your assets across the Now Platform to support business operations.
With hybrid work and decentralized operations becoming the norm, IT and asset management teams face mounting pressure to track and manage distributed hardware in real-time. The lack of visibility into who has what, where, and in what condition leads to security risks, budget overruns, and compliance gaps. Hardware Asset Management (HAM) fills this visibility gap with automation, intelligence, and workflow integration, making it indispensable for today’s enterprises.
While HAM focuses on physical devices, Software Asset Management (SAM) ensures your organization is using software licenses efficiently and staying compliant. SAM tracks usage, helps avoid over-licensing or under-licensing, and can identify opportunities to reduce costs through better vendor management and license optimization. Together, HAM and SAM create a complete picture of your asset environment, with hardware and software working in sync:
While HAM and SAM are both important in ServiceNow Asset Management, for this post, we’re really diving deeper into HAM.
HAM focuses on managing physical IT assets, such as laptops, tablets, servers, and high-value printers, to optimize budgets, streamline workflows, and ensure operational support across the organization. It goes beyond just tracking assets to drive real, measurable business value:
Within ITSM, where incident and change management are central, knowing the location and availability of assets enables faster, more proactive resolution of service tickets. Beyond one-off issues, HAM uncovers long-term trends; for instance, identifying a specific laptop model that generates high volumes of support tickets, signaling a need for standardization changes.
In procurement and finance, HAM delivers the data and insights needed to renegotiate contracts, secure multi-year vendor deals, and inform smarter purchasing. With integrated workflows, HAM automates procurement steps from order to delivery, ensuring visibility across the process and assigning tasks to the right teams at the right time.
An area where HAM becomes very important is supporting a hybrid, or even fully remote workforce. For example, flows exist in HAM to improve self-service capabilities and streamline HAM processes such as onboarding, offboarding, and asset attestation.
With a hybrid or remote workforce, any time there’s a need to deploy an asset to an employee, send a loaner asset, swap out an asset, or reclaim an asset from someone leaving the company, the process can be handled through ServiceNow workflows. Shipment tracking can be integrated with shippers like FedEx and UPS to provide precise data on where assets are in shipment and when they are supposed to be delivered.
HAM is more than inventory management in a hybrid or remote workplace across several areas, including:
Thinking about lifecycle savings support with HAM starts with budget planning and intake processes, and supporting organizational business units to understand costs and enforce standards.
Once purchased assets are in use, they can be tracked throughout their lifecycle through everything from ownership to what’s happening while they are in use to when they need to be repaired. HAM enables asset managers to leverage workflows for repairing assets that are under warranty, along with enriched data that supports processes for extending the life of assets based on performance metrics. Another area of savings is tightening the parameters of how retired decommissioning disposal processes are defined.
And HAM tracks the total cost of ownership (TCO) and depreciation of assets, something that is often tracked manually or in something like an ERP system, but not integrated into what is going on with that asset on a day-to-day basis. With that disconnect, the data isn’t always accurate because calculations may be wrong, or data may not be updated in a timely manner. Tracking TCO and depreciation in HAM puts everything about an asset in one place to be seen and handled in ServiceNow.
HAM provides a foundational framework for tracking operational assets across the enterprise. Without visibility into your hardware, it becomes nearly impossible to accurately manage software, licenses, or network governance, especially in decentralized or hybrid environments.
Asset management connects key disciplines like finance, procurement, IT operations, and compliance. These teams cannot work effectively in silos. CTOs and CIOs prioritize asset management because it directly supports cost control, security, and operational resilience.
You can't secure assets you don’t know exist. You can't optimize spending without visibility into what’s in use. And you can’t manage vulnerabilities without insight into your deployed infrastructure.
ServiceNow offers a unified solution where asset tracking, financial data, contracts, and workflows converge, eliminating silos and manual work. Unlike standalone tools that manage assets in isolation, ServiceNow’s HAM functionality enables integrated, action-ready insights that drive efficiency and measurable value.