Every organization has a finance group that purchases assets; every organization has users that consume those assets; every organization has an IT group that maintains the operation of those assets. However, most organizations do not effectively bridge asset purchase with asset assignment, or initial costs with ongoing maintenance costs-and as such struggle to link IT costs with annual budgets. This is one of the great disconnects between IT and the business. For every IT-related asset, organizations need to know who owns the asset, who is accountable for it (who controls its use), what is the effective cost of ownership and maintenance (and what is the replacement cost), and to whom the asset is assigned (who actually possesses it). Taken to its next step (asset phase 2), IT asset lifecycle management enables both IT professionals and finance organizations to use the same set of data to perform their very different tasks. If IT knows who is responsible for an asset, it can determine how fast (and thus how expensive) maintenance for that asset should be to meet business priorities-which enables the business to make decisions on IT priority, staffing, and spend based on real data. If finance knows how much it costs to maintain an asset, it can work with IT to standardize on lower-cost hardware or software. If finance knows to order new hardware as a function of lease expiration, it can work with IT to pull and replace those machines in an orderly, controlled fashion that has minimal impact on all stakeholders. When those machines happen to be servers, this knowledge can make all the difference in the world.