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 up-to-date.

Documentation helps to identify trends, and have visibility into the trends of your technology that 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 employees are experiencing with their technology. It’s extremely helpful to look at the most common tickets that are submitted 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.

Inventory

We’ll break this down into two parts.

• 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 levels down.
• Your Entire Environment. Documenting your entire IT environment will help you paint a comprehensive picture of how 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 technology, how to improve infrastructure, and how to piece everything together within your network. You will also be able to understand what you already have so you can narrow down what you might need in the future. Not only will this give you peace of mind, but it could save your IT team a lot of time when asking questions regarding the 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 in your business technology. That alone is worth the extra time.