An IT asset inventory, as the name implies, is a list of IT assets that belong to the organization and support a business process or processes. The goal of this activity is to identify as many systems as possible and then, in the scoping phase, narrow the list down to the most important systems. When you keep an assets inventory, you're protecting your investments from harm and from the chance of being lost. While it might seem hard to lose a large investment, it happens more often than you think. Most of the time, these investments aren't actually lost but are simply misplaced.