Most organisations own the pieces of IT Asset Management: a request catalogue, a procurement system, licence records, contracts, an asset register and a CMDB. What they often lack is the connection between them, so every piece is maintained separately and none of them fully trusts the others.
This guide describes what a connected ITAM operating model looks like in ServiceNow, and how to build one, drawing on NowBench's global delivery with FactSet.
The connected journey, end to end
A connected operating model treats asset management as one journey with six stages: request, approve, check, procure, update and deliver. The employee requests through a single front door. Approval routes automatically. Entitlement or orderable model checks happen before money is spent. Procurement executes in the finance system. Contracts, purchase orders and asset records update as a consequence of the flow, not as a separate admin task. Fulfilment closes the loop.
When the journey is connected, asset data stays accurate because accuracy is a by-product of the process rather than a manual discipline.
Start with a single front door
The front door decision matters more than it first appears. If employees request hardware, software and SaaS in different places, the organisation has already lost the single journey.
In the FactSet engagement, Employee Center Pro became the global entry point across Hardware Asset Management, Software Asset Management, Change and Knowledge. One front door, one experience, and every request entering the same governed flow.
Build request types as reusable patterns
The mistake at scale is building each request type as a bespoke item. The alternative is designing a small number of reusable patterns and stamping request types out of them.
At FactSet, 50 software request types and 3 hardware request types were built using repeatable patterns designed to support hundreds more, with controlled orderable model management for hardware. New request types then become configuration, not projects.
Check entitlement before spending
The commercial value of connected ITAM concentrates at the check stage. Before procurement triggers, the platform checks whether an existing licence or entitlement can satisfy the request.
This requires licence visibility across the major platforms. FactSet connected Microsoft 365, Salesforce and Adobe for licence visibility, so decisions about new spend could be informed by what the organisation already owned.
Integrate procurement rather than duplicating it
ServiceNow should orchestrate the journey, not replace the finance system. Integration through IntegrationHub lets ServiceNow hand procurement to the system of record and receive the results back into the asset and contract data.
FactSet connected Workday procurement into the ServiceNow workflows, so sourcing and finance happened where they belonged while the journey stayed visible end to end.
Strengthen the asset and CMDB data foundation
Asset records and configuration items describe the same estate from different angles, and they drift apart when maintained separately. Discovery keeps the technical reality honest; alignment rules keep asset and CMDB views consistent.
In the FactSet delivery, Discovery was optimised and CMDB alignment improved as part of the ITAM work, because asset governance is only as good as the data underneath it.
Treat stakeholder alignment as delivery work
A global ITAM model touches IT, procurement, finance, security, HR and regional teams. At FactSet, more than 20 stakeholder groups were aligned across the United States, India, Asia, Africa and wider regions.
That alignment was not a side effect. It was planned, worked and maintained, and it is the reason a global rollout landed as one operating model rather than a set of regional variations.