What to Review in IT Asset Management Before 2027

Preparing IT asset management (ITAM) for 2027 takes four steps: assess your current state against ISO/IEC 19770, align finance and executive stakeholders on business outcomes, reassess every capability for AI, and build a prioritized action plan with named owners and measures.

The biggest gap is not technical. In Flexera's 2026 State of ITAM Report, only about one program in three works with IT finance (36%) or the C-suite (33%), the people who hold the budget and set the direction.

For years, ITAM and SAM programs have been measured on licensing, compliance, and cost optimization. Those goals still matter. They are no longer enough.

Two sets of pressure are squeezing programs at once. On the market side, boards have stopped asking only how to optimize cost. They want to know when technology investment will show a return. Vendors are also moving from seat-only pricing to seat plus consumption and, in some cases, outcome-based pricing, while most ITAM processes were built for the per-seat, per-core era.

On the technology side, anyone can now stand up an AI agent or generative AI tool without going through IT, which leaves a bigger, messier portfolio full of shadow AI. Agentic workflows provision and consume resources with little oversight. Spend is layered across software, cloud, models, data, and APIs, and those categories are too tightly connected to manage one at a time.

None of these pressures are new. AI has raised the intensity of all of them at once, and every one lands on your ITAM team whether it is ready or not. When Anglepoint asked webinar attendees which pressures affected them most, multi-layered technology spend ranked at the top, followed by AI-driven model disruption and value scrutiny.

In the Anglepoint webinar ITAM Preparation for Success in 2027, Ron Brill, Chairman of Anglepoint, outlined four steps ITAM leaders can take now. Here is what each one involves.

Step 1: Assess Where You Stand Against ISO/IEC 19770

Every one of those pressures raises the same question. Is your IT asset management approach still fit for purpose?

Most programs were built around licensing, compliance, and cost optimization. The capabilities behind them may not have kept pace with current demands. Answering that question takes a reference model. Without one, the assessment is an opinion.

Anglepoint's model, the same foundation behind its ITAM Program Transformation service, is built on ISO/IEC 19770, the management system standard for ITAM. It maps 27 capabilities across the plan, do, check, act cycle.

Plan is the foundation: scope, objectives, leadership, controls, KPIs, and roles. When this layer is soft, everything downstream struggles. Do is where most of the effort goes, including data, visibility, analysis, and the lifecycle from request to deprovisioning. The question here is whether each capability still fits your organization. Does your discovery cover AI consumption and dynamic services, for example? Check is how you know the program is working, through steering committee actions, anomaly reporting, and program monitoring. Act is the discipline of adjusting, improving, and going around the loop again.

A model like this is complete, so it surfaces the governance gaps that often explain why data and tools are not delivering. It is also defensible. Findings you take to a CIO or CFO rest on an international standard, not a homegrown framework.

The evaluation itself follows four steps, and the order matters.

1. Hear the business first. Interview the people the program exists to serve, then hold a working session to agree on expected outcomes, scope, who owns what, and who decides.
2. Review what is defined. Look at the charter, processes, controls, roles, and APIs. Are they clear, and are they still relevant? This tells you what the program intends to do.
3. Trace the work. Follow real data, transactions, workflows, and decisions to see what actually happens.
4. Put expectations next to evidence, then confirm the strengths, gaps, and changes with the same stakeholders you started with. That builds the buy-in you need to act.

The gap between steps two and three is where the most useful findings tend to appear. Plenty of programs have well-written process documents and a very different reality in practice.

Step 2: Align Finance and Executive Stakeholders

Stakeholder input sets the requirements for everything else in the evaluation. It shapes scope, priorities, and the measures of success. That raises an obvious question: are you engaging the right stakeholders?

Many groups rely on ITAM for different reasons. Finance wants cost visibility. Security wants to manage risk. Procurement needs commercial insight. Operations needs accurate asset data.

Now look at who ITAM actually works with. In Flexera's 2026 State of ITAM Report, which drew just over 500 responses, infrastructure, cloud, and service management teams sit at the top, the groups ITAM grew up beside. At the bottom are IT finance at 36% and the C-suite at 33%. Only about one program in three works with the people who hold the budget and set the direction.

The teams that fund and steer technology investment are the ones ITAM engages least. The best license position in the world stays invisible if finance and executives never see it.

There are two ways to change that. First, bring these groups together around a shared business problem, not around ITAM for its own sake, and find an executive sponsor who can convene them. AI governance and AI value are among the most timely problems in most companies, and they give every one of these teams a reason to sit at the same table.

Second, align on business outcomes before you say a word about ITAM processes and tools. Each stakeholder group cares about a different outcome:

• Operations wants trusted, real-time asset data.
• Infrastructure and cloud teams want one view across what is owned and what is consumed.
• Vendor management wants intelligence ahead of the decision.
• Executives want a management system tied to strategy.
• Security and risk want defensible, audit-ready outcomes.

The goals differ, but the capabilities and data underneath them are shared. That is the argument to make to every stakeholder. ITAM is a set of capabilities the whole organization depends on, not one team's job. Working backward from what each group needs shows you where to focus. None of it sticks without change enablement and adoption.

Outcomes are only half of it. Stakeholders also need to agree on how the program operates. Finance wants cost discipline, the business wants speed, and security and operations want quality and reliability. Every ITAM decision sits somewhere inside that iron triangle, and pushing hard on one corner moves the other two. Value is the balance point.

Not every investment needs the same balance. A customer-facing AI pilot and a core ERP platform should not be governed the same way. Where the balance sits is a business decision, not an ITAM decision, and you will not know the answer without talking to the business.

Four elements should be agreed explicitly with executives:

• Program objectives: what the program is optimizing for.
• Scope of technology: software only, or also cloud, SaaS, hardware, AI services, and AI models.
• Controls: which guardrails apply, and how tight they are.
• Roles: who owns each decision, especially where ITAM, FinOps, security, and procurement overlap.

Once those are set, controls and ITAM KPIs nearly design themselves. Every control is a guardrail on one corner of the triangle, and every KPI shows whether you are holding the balance you agreed to. Revisit them as the business changes, because the balance will move.

Step 3: Use AI as a Stress Test for ITAM

In Anglepoint's assessments, the same three problems come up again and again.

The first is a weak foundation. Scope is unclear, the executive sponsor is missing or unclear, and objectives are purely compliance objectives that nobody outside the team has agreed to. The second is operational gaps: data you cannot fully trust, processes that exist only on paper, tools that never delivered because the data and processes around them were disconnected, and a team staffed for compliance that is now being asked about cloud, SaaS, and AI. The third is failure to evolve. Objectives have not moved while the business has, and a team consumed by firefighting has no capacity to improve.

These problems feed each other. A weak foundation produces gaps. Gaps stop the program from evolving. A program that does not evolve delivers limited value, limited value reduces leadership support, and reduced support weakens the foundation further.

This is not a tooling problem. In the same Flexera research, 71% of ITAM practitioners said lack of engagement with internal business partners is a challenge. The way out is to break the loop at the foundation.

Heading into 2027, AI is the forcing function. It is not creating a new ITAM discipline off to the side. It is stress-testing the discipline you already have, including the parts you believe are mature. The six pressures described earlier show up across all 27 capabilities. Three examples show how.

Visibility. AI is embedded in products you already own, switched on as add-ons, spun up as agents, and running outside normal IT channels. That is why only 31% of ITAM teams say they have visibility into AI software.

Optimization. Token-based pricing, variable consumption, and new cost drivers are new territory for most teams. 59% of respondents say wasted AI software spend rose year over year. Waste is growing faster than the controls around it.

Governance. Who approves an AI subscription, a model, or an agent's access to a system? ITAM, FinOps, security, and the AI team can each claim a stake, and decision rights are often unsettled. Controls have to support innovation, not stifle it.

The finance gap makes this more pressing. In the Tokenomics Foundation's recent State of Tokenomics research, 73% of respondents had low confidence in proving AI outcomes to the CFO. The CFO is also the stakeholder ITAM engages least. That vacuum is the biggest opportunity ITAM has had in about a decade to become relevant at the top of the organization.

The lesson is not to bolt an AI module onto the program. Reassess the whole program, evolve what matters, and set aside what does not.

Step 4: Build a Prioritized Action Plan You Can Fund

You cannot close every gap at once, so prioritize. A simple method is to plot each item by business impact against implementation complexity.

High impact and low complexity items are quick wins. Act on these first. Examples include closing entitlement gaps before a major renewal, reclaiming unused licenses ahead of a true-up, and finding the AI add-ons and new usage terms that have crept into your contracts. Quick wins fund the rest of the program and build credibility inside the organization.

High impact and high complexity items are strategic investments. Examples include automating reconciliation for your biggest publishers, building a total cost view across hardware, software, SaaS, and cloud, and creating lifecycle controls for AI assets and agents. Plan, phase, and sequence these behind the quick wins.

Low impact and low complexity items are day-to-day hygiene. Pursue them selectively once the first two groups are addressed.

Low impact and high complexity items deserve a challenge. Ask whether you should do them at all. Examples include reconciling every long-tail publisher to reach 100% coverage, and building custom workflows for one-off requests. They tend to take enormous effort and return little.

To place an item, ask four questions: what is its impact, how urgent is it, is the organization ready for it, and does it make ITAM more relevant for what is coming? One caveat applies. Dependencies can override the matrix. A low-impact item may go first if three high-impact items depend on it.

The last step is turning the prioritized list into a roadmap people will fund and execute. That takes three moves.

1. Sequence it. Now covers critical gaps, quick wins, urgent risks, and any foundational fixes in the plan layer, because everything else slips if the foundation is weak. Next builds capability, closing priority gaps and preparing for the new demands above. Later covers scale and evolution, with more automation, governance, and business value.
2. Evolve capabilities instead of rebuilding them. Each of the 27 capabilities sits at a different maturity level. Apply a crawl, walk, run approach to each one on its own, and keep cycling through plan, do, check, act as technology and the business change.
3. Make it actionable. Every line needs an outcome, a named owner, dependencies, resources, milestones, and measures tied to the KPIs you agreed on with stakeholders.

If a line is missing any of those, it is not on the roadmap. It is a wish list.

Start Preparing for 2027 Now

Preparing for 2027 comes down to three things: understand where you are today, align with what matters to the business, and start the work now.

Anglepoint, repeatedly recognized as a Leader in SAM Managed Services by Gartner and IDC, helps enterprises assess ITAM capabilities against ISO/IEC 19770, align stakeholders around shared outcomes, and turn findings into a prioritized plan they can fund.

Anglepoint's ITAM strategy and roadmap workshop covers each step in this article: a maturity baseline, a stakeholder summary, a prioritized roadmap, and action items. Ready to see where you stand? Talk to an Anglepoint ITAM expert.

For the full walkthrough, including the slides and the stakeholder outcomes map, watch the webinar recording.