Why its important to Document your IT

The speed of technology is often furious, both from an evolution perspective and a malicious exploitation perspective. Couple this with a changing business landscape it starts to become clearer why having the details of your IT documented is important.

So, what should I document?

There is really no limit to what can be documented, and it is common to find a very broad spectrum across organisations ranging from zero to everything the organisation has, its goals, ambition, business function, gaps and more.

The important thing is figuring out where to start and what to do first. And then jump in!

The simplest thing to do is to start with what you have, what makes your organisation function, that is Systems, Servers and Infrastructure.

Start with generating a Catalogue to record a unique identifier, something that is not likely to change like the Server Name, decide what important attributes to record – this is critical as its only worth recording information that will allow you to assess the import facets that link to risk, similarities, and usage. However, don’t let me stop you recording whatever you want.

In this example, you can use this information to provide useful insights into risk around EoL OS, Warranty Expiration, Ownership/Management.

This can enable a structured project to replace dated equipment, drive a decision to extend warranty or replace and assess your managed service provider footprint. This YouTube clip demonstrating using a service catalogue for enriched insights.

Catalogues

Catalogues are the simplest form to create a Service Catalogue. Generate multiple Catalogues to hold various information. Infrastructure, Data Centres, Services, Applications… You get the idea.

Dependency Management

Next on the hit list would be generating dependencies between these catalogues. That will give you insights to ascertain details such as which data centres are responsible for which servers and furthermore which applications are dependent on which servers, etc.

Valuable insights can be gained by this level of documentation – do you have redundancy, are your applications spread across your servers in a controlled nature. Is there an opportunity to consolidate and save money and so on.

Tooling

There are tools that enable this type of activity the simplest form being Microsoft Excel. More advanced tools from vendors offer comprehensive packages at a cost. The key to the tooling aspect is to enable the sharing of data in an easy transferrable way, saving Visualisations to enable quick re-use and categorisation of your Visualisations pertinent to Stakeholder groups and their individual viewpoint perspectives as per TOGAF best practice. Not all tools are expensive and can get you a long way in your documentation journey.

What's Next

This scratches the surface of what documentation looks like... In future articles we shall dive into documenting your Business Capabilities, Data & Reporting Dictionaries, Producing Risk Registers, Third Party Catalogues, Data Lineage and more.