In all aspects of business, there is typically some form of documentation. You could be tracking certain numbers for goal completion, documenting budgets, or analyzing metrics for performance purposes. Just like anything else in your business, documentation of your IT environment is a necessary step to keeping your business technology current and up-to-date.
Documentation helps to identify trends, and having the visibility into the trends of your technology will put your organization's IT at a competitive advantage. Here is what your IT team should be keeping a record of when tracking the happenings of your IT environment.
ALL SUPPORT ISSUES
It's important to have a record of all day-to-day issues your employee's are experiencing with their technology. It's extremely helpful to look at the most common tickets that are inputted when determining future IT strategies. Documentation helps provide a visual into whether one consistent issue is happening across multiple users, or if the same issue is happening to the same user more than once.
Having this cohesive record of support issues will also help your IT team determine how they can best accommodate your users. For example, if a user's computer is slow for a consistent amount of time, it may be time for an upgrade. Another way documentation can assist your IT team is when repetitive issues arise. If there is previous documentation of the same issue, an IT professional will have more insight into solving the same problem quickly, and may be able to determine a more permanent solution as well.
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INVENTORY
Product Orders. Ordering new products for your IT environment is a very common occurrence, especially if you have multiple users or if you are consistently bringing in new talent. Keeping an up-to-date list of what products your IT team is ordering will help you make more informed decisions when having to sign off on ordering new products. Understanding what you already have, as well as what you plan to order in the near future, will keep your budget on track and your stress level low.
Your Entire Environment. Documenting your entire IT environment will help to paint a comprehensive picture of how all of your technology works together to support your business. Your IT team will have a list they can pull from when making decisions on whether to upgrade your technology, how to improve your infrastructure, and how to piece everything together within your network. You will also be able to understand what you already have, to narrow down what you may need in the future. Not only will this give you peace of mind, it could save your IT team a lot of time when asking questions regarding your IT environment.
As your organization works to improve and streamline technical processes and procedures, be sure your IT team goes the extra mile in terms of documentation practices. The more you have documented, the more visibility you will have into your business technology. That alone is worth the extra time.
