Most asset registers drift the day they are created. Devices join the network without procurement records; assets are retired without updates; spreadsheets fork into departmental copies.
The fastest way to understand the problem is to measure it. Scan one network segment — one site, one floor, one VLAN — and reconcile the results against the register. Classify every difference: unknown devices (present on the network, absent from the register), ghost assets (in the register, absent from the network), and drifted attributes (wrong owner, location, or warranty state).
The result is a measurable visibility gap: a percentage and a list. That number does two things. It gives leadership a concrete scope for the problem, and it becomes the baseline you improve from. Organizations typically find 8–20% of active devices missing from their register on the first scan.
From there, the fix is structural rather than heroic: continuous discovery that reconciles automatically, so the register stays current as a by-product of daily work instead of a quarterly project.