Every organisation has assets they need to track. But for many organisations, these assets are scattered across the company in different systems (often including spreadsheets) that make it hard to understand precisely what you have, what state it is in, and what needs to be done to it. 

Through accurate asset information, IT teams and others can work more proactively, plan ahead, and ultimately waste less time and budget.

We predict this will only become more critical as organisations turn to AI for business data analysis. Scattered, incomplete data cannot be used for AI. And to make it more difficult, the line between asset and data becomes ever more blurred with AI. Is a laptop warranty an asset? Not traditionally, but if you want AI to truly understand your laptops, their warranty documents should be included somewhere in the system, so that the AI has more context if you ask it something about your laptops.

Asset management is evolving, and organisations will need to adapt, starting with how they define assets.

What is an asset?

Different people, teams, and businesses have different definitions of an asset. For the sake of this article, we will define an asset as anything that has value to an organisation. That covers the usual physical assets such as laptops, network devices, and machinery. But it can also mean non-physical assets like cloud resources, software licences, IP addresses, contracts/warranties, compliance regulations, people, customers, and almost anything else. 

 An asset is anything of value that a company owns and can be used to generate revenue, provide services, or enhance the company's operations.

What they all have in common is that they are ‘things’ that need to be tracked. And that these ‘things’ or assets influence business operations, processes, and decision making. Do we need to buy more MacBooks? Are we compliant with this regulation? Can we cut the cost of our software licences? To answer these questions detailed information on different assets needs to be made available to employees.

What is the difference between assets?

Assets also often have a lifetime over which they are relevant and some dependencies to other objects or assets. A laptop has an owner and a vendor. A compliance regulation can be applied to certain assets or has a responsible steward etc.

Different organisations will care about other things, and what makes sense for one will not make sense for another. The first step is to determine what is important to your organisation or what information will help you and your colleagues make better decisions. 

A good starting point is identifying what data is currently being tracked in spreadsheets. Almost every team or organisation has one spreadsheet filled with critical data. Usually, they are created in a moment of urgency when something needs to be tracked immediately. It was a quick fix; it was easy to set up and it’s easy to use. 

But over time, these spreadsheets grow without structure, processes, or validation, until they become chaotic. We have seen everything from robots to new product R&D risk ratings stored in spreadsheets, which needed migrating to an asset management system.

What is asset management?

Broadly speaking, asset management is the process of collecting assets into a centralized database so you can understand what you have, where they are, and their history. IT asset management tends to focus a lot on lifecycle management and ensuring assets get deployed and depreciated in a timely manner. Outside of IT, financial depreciation or tracking asset maintenance schedules may be the more crucial element of asset management. 

Again, no one definition works for every team and organisation. You will know better than any vendor what is important for you to know about your assets.

Why is asset management so necessary in the modern organisation?

If you expand beyond the outdated definition of assets as just physical items, most organisations have more assets than ever. These assets can change fast and are key to the daily operation of the business. This often means more people need access to information about the same assets.

We see asset data becoming increasingly fragmented and siloed as different teams create their versions of asset truth. For example, finance and IT likely both care about how much hardware you have in stock, and legal and IT likely both care about the same compliance regulations. There is a need for a centralised source of asset data. Even if different teams look at different bits of information about the asset, they should still look at the same asset record. Otherwise, you risk inconsistencies and errors.  

This becomes even more important with AI, which demands complete, accurate data to work effectively. We see that asset management systems increasingly need to be connected to other sources of information. 

Having a full view of all aspects of your assets available means AI can be properly utilized to answer questions like ‘what would we need to purchase if we add 40 headcount across sales and marketing this year?’ to help with planning and decision making. To answer that question the AI needs access to asset information on employees, user device assignments, software access, stock levels, to name a few. 

How Starhive helps teams manage their assets more effectively

From the challenges outlined above, two main factors stand out. Organisations need a place that can store exactly what assets they need to store. And it needs to be able to provide the complete picture to distribute relevant information to different people or AI. 

That is what Starhive was built for. Our innovative approach to asset management means that no two Starhive users will have the exact same setup. Starhive users can, if they need to, customize all areas from asset types, asset attributes, asset relationships, automation rules, lifecycles, and even the user interface to show different teams what they need to see. We have people storing everything from classic IT assets to reviews of restaurants for team lunches. In our world there is no line between assets and traditional data.

Organisations using Starhive for asset management find that they end up with a system that stores everything they need to make critical business decisions without a load of extra noise they don’t need. And because Starhive connects to over 450 other systems, it’s simple to bring in extra assets/data to provide more context when required to help provide more context for future AI applications.

Our next step is to bring in AI capabilities. First to help keep asset information clean and up to date, but then to provide analytics and simulation so organisations can make planning decisions much faster.

Connecting Starhive with Jira Cloud

Once you have your assets in an asset management system, you next need to know what work is to be done on your assets. This requires some form of ticketing system. That’s where the Starhive integration for Jira comes in. While Starhive has ticketing itself, we want to ensure we integrate into existing tech stacks as easily as possible.

Starhive assets can be brought into any version of Jira Cloud and Jira Service Management Cloud. Assets are linked to Jira work items via custom fields. They can also be used in Jira Service Management portal forms, meaning both Jira users and external colleagues/customers can link assets to work items if required. 

Who are Starhive?

Starhive was built from a desire to bring order to chaos. After seeing how many organisations managed their assets and data, the Starhive team decided to build a system to help. Created by the same team that developed Insight, the Jira add-on for asset management that was acquired by Atlassian in 2020, we have combined our love for good data management and software freedom to create Starhive. 

Starhive & Peakforce

We are happy to introduce you to our technology partner, Starhive. We’ve started working together to facilitate asset management for our current and future clients, bringing a modern approach to the field.

As an Atlassian Solution Partner, we can integrate Jira with Starhive and guide you through the process of implementing their solution. 

Contact us via form or e-mail and let's turn your challenges into success stories!

FAQ

• What is an asset?
  
  • An asset is anything of value that an organization owns and uses to generate revenue, deliver services, or support operations. Assets can be physical (like laptops, routers, or machinery) or non-physical (like software licenses, cloud resources, contracts, warranties, and even people or compliance rules).
• What is asset management?
  
  • Asset management is the practice of collecting, tracking, and organizing all assets in a central system. It helps teams understand what assets they have, where those assets are, who uses them, and how they’re performing. This allows organizations to make smarter decisions, reduce waste, stay compliant, and plan more effectively.
• Are assets always physical?
  
  • Assets can be both physical and non-physical. Besides hardware, organizations also manage software licenses, cloud services, compliance requirements, contracts, and even data like employee records or customer lists.
• What’s the difference between asset management and lifecycle management?
  
  • Asset management covers everything about an asset - what it is, where it is, and how it’s used. Lifecycle management is a part of that: it focuses on tracking each asset from acquisition through deployment, usage, updates, and finally retirement or disposal.

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