Updated September 2026.
When an ITAM program is visibly failing, audits keep costing more than they should, SaaS spend keeps drifting up, and nobody can produce a clean number for what the organization actually owns, the instinct is almost always to buy a new tool. A new discovery agent, a new SAM platform, a new module bolted onto the existing ITSM suite. It is worth pausing on that instinct, because the data suggests it usually is not the actual gap.
What the current data actually shows
Flexera’s 2025 State of ITAM report, based on a survey of IT asset management professionals, found that complete visibility into IT assets declined to 43% of organizations, down from 47% the year before. That decline happened while cost pressure was rising, not falling: 35% of respondents reported increased SaaS waste over the past year.
The audit numbers in the same report are the clearest evidence that tooling alone is not solving this. 45% of organizations spent over a million dollars on software audits across the past three years, and 23% spent more than five million dollars in 2025 alone. Those are organizations that, in most cases, already own ITAM or SAM tooling. The tool did not prevent the audit exposure, because the tool was never the actual constraint.
What a new tool doesn’t fix
ITAM and SAM platforms are reconciliation engines. They compare what discovery tools report against what entitlement records say you own, and they are only as accurate as the two data sets feeding them. A new platform layered on top of incomplete discovery coverage, inconsistent naming conventions, or entitlement data nobody has reconciled in years will produce the same wrong answer with a nicer dashboard around it.
This is the pattern an ITAM maturity assessment is built to catch before a purchase order goes out, not after.
Discovery coverage that quietly has gaps
Most organizations can name their primary discovery tool, but very few can state with confidence what percentage of their actual estate it covers, especially across cloud instances, containers, and edge or remote-work endpoints that were added faster than the discovery configuration kept up. An assessment measures this directly instead of assuming the discovery tool’s own dashboard is telling the whole story.
Reconciliation that runs on stale entitlement data
License entitlement records rot quietly. Contracts renew with different terms, true-up clauses change, and nobody updates the internal record until an audit forces the issue. A maturity assessment checks whether entitlement data is treated as a living system of record or as a folder of PDFs someone can search when asked.
Ownership that sits nowhere in particular
Flexera’s report also found that 44% of ITAM teams now collaborate with cloud teams and 38% with FinOps teams, which is a healthy trend but also a sign of how fragmented ownership has become. When hardware, software, SaaS, and cloud spend are tracked by different teams with different tools and different definitions of “asset,” a single new platform cannot unify them by itself. Governance has to be assessed and assigned before a tool can enforce it.
What an ITAM maturity assessment actually diagnoses
Rather than asking whether you have a SAM tool, an ITAM maturity assessment scores the program across the parts that determine whether any tool will actually work: discovery coverage and accuracy, reconciliation process and cadence, entitlement and contract data quality, cross-team governance and ownership, and how consistently the resulting numbers are used in real audit and renewal decisions rather than produced once and filed away.
That scoring produces something a tool evaluation cannot: a ranked list of which gap is actually costing the most money right now. For some organizations that is discovery coverage in a specific part of the estate. For others, tooling is already adequate and the real gap is that nobody owns reconciliation as an ongoing process rather than a pre-audit scramble.
Three patterns worth checking before the next purchase order
- Buying a new ITAM platform on top of the same discovery gaps. If discovery coverage was never measured, a new platform inherits the same blind spots with a better user interface.
- Treating ITAM as a procurement function rather than a lifecycle one. Programs that only engage at renewal time miss the reclamation, right-sizing, and decommissioning opportunities that happen in between, which is where a large share of the waste Flexera measured actually accumulates.
- Running software and hardware asset management as separate, disconnected efforts. When SAM and hardware asset management do not share a common configuration data source, the same physical or virtual asset can show up as compliant in one system and unaccounted for in the other.
Sequencing tooling decisions after the assessment, not before
None of this argues against buying tooling. It argues for buying the right tooling, sized correctly, aimed at the gap the data actually shows. An assessment that takes a few weeks up front is a small cost against a platform decision that will shape audit exposure and license spend for years, and it gives whoever signs the purchase order a specific, evidenced reason for the number attached to it.
What the assessment produces beyond a maturity score
The most practical output of an ITAM maturity assessment is not the score itself, it is the specific list of what to fix and in what order. A typical roadmap separates findings into fixes that reduce audit exposure quickly, such as reconciling entitlement records for the highest-risk vendors first, from structural changes that take longer, such as establishing a single owner for cross-team asset governance or integrating hardware and software discovery into one data source.
That separation matters because it lets an organization act on the cheapest, fastest risk reduction immediately while the larger tooling or process investment is still being scoped and budgeted. An organization that skips straight to a platform purchase usually ends up doing both at once, under audit pressure, with far less room to sequence the work sensibly.
Where DesQcon fits
DesQcon runs ITAM maturity assessments across discovery, reconciliation, entitlement data quality, and governance, and we are not paid by any vendor to recommend a platform. The output is a prioritized roadmap built from your organization’s actual data, so whichever system ends up holding your license and asset records reflects what you really own and what you actually run.
See our ITSM Maturity Assessment Methodology for how we score people, process, tools, automation, AI, and governance, the same framework we apply when assessing asset management maturity, and read ITSM Maturity Assessment: Why It Should Come Before Your Transformation Budget for why this baseline should come before any new spend.
Frequently asked questions
Is an ITAM maturity assessment the same as a software audit?
No. An audit, whether run by a vendor or internally ahead of one, checks compliance against current entitlements at a point in time. A maturity assessment looks at the process, data, and governance that produced those numbers, and scores whether the program can sustain accurate answers between audits rather than scrambling to produce one under deadline.
We already have a SAM tool. Do we still need this?
Usually yes, and it is often the organizations with an existing tool that benefit most, because the assessment explains why the tool’s numbers do not match reality rather than assuming the tool itself is the problem.
How is hardware asset management different from software or SaaS asset management in this assessment?
The dimensions scored are the same (discovery, reconciliation, data quality, governance) but the failure patterns differ. Hardware tends to fail through undiscovered or “zombie” assets still drawing cost after their workload ends; software and SaaS tend to fail through unreconciled entitlements and unused seats. A full assessment covers both rather than treating them as separate problems.
Check your own ITSM and ITOM maturity
If this raised questions about where your own organization stands, DesQcon’s ITSM & ITOM Maturity Assessment gives you a structured, evidence-based read on that. Start with a free trial across one process area, or request the full deep-dive assessment across people, process, tools, automation, AI, and governance.
