IT asset management covers more than a spreadsheet of laptops. Here's what it actually includes, why manual tracking breaks down, and how it differs from a CMDB.
IT asset management (ITAM) is the practice of tracking every piece of hardware and software an organisation owns, from the day it's purchased to the day it's retired: who has it, what it cost, whether it's covered by warranty, and what's licensed to run on it. Done well, it's the single source of truth every other IT and finance process depends on, from budgeting the next hardware refresh to answering an auditor's question about a specific serial number.
A spreadsheet works for the first fifty devices. Past that, three things start to drift apart at once: what's actually in Intune, what was originally purchased, and who currently has each device. Nobody updates the spreadsheet when a laptop gets reassigned in a hurry, and by the time an audit or a ransomware incident asks "what do we actually own", the honest answer is nobody's fully sure.
A configuration management database tracks systems and their dependencies, useful for incident response and change management. ITAM tracks ownership, cost and lifecycle, useful for procurement, finance and compliance. The two overlap on individual devices but answer different questions, and most IT teams running any scale of Microsoft estate end up needing both, usually with the two systems reconciled by serial number rather than run in isolation.
The common thread across all of it: ITAM stops being a periodic clean-up exercise and becomes something that stays accurate on its own, because it's reconciled against the systems (Intune, Entra ID, Microsoft 365) that already know the truth.