Explore a Career as an IT Technician

Your daily role goes beyond setting up workstations and resolving issues. Another part of your job is to manage the IT assets.

As an IT technician, you’ll need to have a full and accurate inventory of the organization's equipment. This inventory will allow you to stay on top of your stock so that you can:

• Be prepared for faults.

• Upgrade equipment when necessary.

• Manage relations with suppliers (equipment with warranties or under contract).

• Organize maintenance.

Let’s have a look at the tasks involved in managing IT assets.

Identify the IT Assets

When setting up new equipment, you need to log details that will allow you to identify it within your IT infrastructure. The details you generally capture are the brand, model, and serial number at the very minimum.

Before being used in production, log these details in a database known as IT asset management software.

This information will give you an overview of the equipment currently used or in stock and which pieces have contracts with suppliers.

Manage Inventory Stock

Having a good idea of what equipment you have available is crucial.

If a workstation develops a fault, you need sufficient stock to replace it quickly and enable the user to get on with their work. You must also be prepared for the machine components to fail and have spare parts available, such as hard disks, memory modules, network cards, etc. This also applies to external peripherals, such as keyboards, mice, telephones, headsets, and screens.

Let’s imagine you're the on-call IT technician over the weekend. A server’s hard disk has failed, and you don’t have a spare one. It's 2 a.m. on a Saturday, and you can’t reach your supplier before Monday at 8 a.m. In other words, it’s not a great start to the week! 😱

As part of your role, you need to understand what equipment you may need to prepare for situations like this. In our example, you would have noticed in the asset management software that there were no spare disks in stock and ordered a new one, which you would have then received and logged in the inventory system.

Track Warranties and Maintenance Contracts

Centralizing the equipment data means linking equipment or software to external suppliers.

It’s quite common for organizations to have maintenance contracts for their IT resources. The organization pays a provider to resolve any malfunctions on machines such as printers. This same provider might also supply ink and toner.

Therefore, you need to log your consumables into your inventory and order them from the supplier when needed.

Similarly, you might have a supplier who provides a warranty for your equipment. Brands such as Cisco, HP, and Dell can provide maintenance contracts that include warranties or even a lifetime guarantee.

Let’s look at a real-world scenario: You have a stock of Lenovo laptop computers, and one of them has a cracked screen.

You look up its serial number in your database and see that it’s under a maintenance contract with the supplier. They must come on-site within 24 hours to repair or replace the machine.

You contact the supplier by phone, email, or their ticketing software and request a service call for the laptop with serial number ABC123.

Your IT assets inventory enables you to identify what you need to order from suppliers to maintain your stock levels. You can also see what equipment you have covered by warranties and that you’re not responsible for fixing.

Examine Recurrent Requests

Many ticketing software applications allow you to analyze user requests and link them to your IT asset stocks and inventories. This means that you can associate a particular piece of equipment or a software component to a ticket. Linking this information together enables you to make decisions and better understand the needs of your users.

Imagine that your software provides you with support statistics for the previous month. For example, last month, you handled 200 tickets. You realize that 120 of these tickets related to printer incidents, and a quarter were requests for help with Excel, part of the Microsoft Office Suite.

Your integrated ticketing and IT asset management system gives you data showing regular printer faults, which can be relayed to your supplier so that you can find a solution. You can also conclude that users need more training on office applications. So, you may want to organize a training session and call the printer supplier!

Maintain IT Assets

Another aspect of an IT technician’s role is managing equipment maintenance.

Well, yes, that’s part of it. You've been paying attention. 😉

There are three types of IT maintenance:

• Corrective

• Preventive

• Evolutionary

Confused? Don’t worry; we’ll go through it together.

Corrective Maintenance

As soon as a fault occurs, your role is to get the equipment or software working again.

For example, you might update some software, repair or replace equipment, reconfigure a system, remove a virus, restart a service, or reboot a server that has stopped responding.

In this context, you perform corrective maintenance. 

Preventive Maintenance

When managing IT assets, an essential type of maintenance is preventive. The aim is to limit the likelihood of problems occurring before they happen – or even avoid them altogether – whether hardware, software, or security issues.

Keeping antivirus tools and other applications updated is the basis of preventive maintenance. For example, a software update is published because an improvement has been made or a security loophole has been fixed.

Every day, many security breaches are uncovered, affecting operating systems, services, or very common applications, such as internet browsers. Therefore, it's crucial to keep systems updated to ensure data security.

Evolutionary Maintenance

Evolutionary maintenance aims to improve the performance of IT systems.

Earlier, you saw an example of tickets that showed recurrent printer incidents. If you approach the problem with improvement in mind, you might decide to change your printers and select a more recent model or a better-performing brand.

This type of maintenance often entails buying new hardware or software to optimize the IT system and provide new functionality. For example, your organization might decide to have a virtual data center or host some of its IT systems in the cloud to reduce maintenance and running costs.

Let's Recap!

Efficient management of IT assets includes:

• An inventory of equipment in an IT asset management application.

• Monitoring stocks to minimize outages and reduce the time to resolve issues.

• Analysis of issues and recurrent requests.

• Applying the three levels of maintenance: 

  • Corrective (resolve incidents)

  • Preventive (prevent malfunctions and maintain security)

  • Evolutionary (improve the infrastructure) 

Now you know how to manage your IT assets.

Your daily role as an IT technician gives you the capability to provide a complementary service, which we’ll cover in the next chapter on improving IT systems.