Last updated: January 10, 2020
All employees of the IT department need information on current configurations in the IT landscape. Especially, help desk staff must have access to adequate information about the various IT systems for successful troubleshooting, as they are supposed to be the main contacts for customers seeking help. They should be able to solve all problems quickly and competently. Without access to proper IT documentation, they are often lost and need to ask the responsible system administrator about how to solve a problem. This means disturbing the system administrator who has to interrupt his current work – an approach that is not too effective.
A consistent information base for everyone
This situation is unsatisfactory for all persons involved. So, why not making the required information available to the help desk staff through CMDB-based IT documentation? This ensures fast access to the required information without the need to log on each time to the respective IT system. This is always a bit delicate, as it bears the risk that the logged-on user alters or shuts down the system in question or even corrupts it. What is more, the administrator will not be too happy to find himself compelled to set up user accounts for each system. From an IT security point of view, this approach is not recommendable anyway.
A consistent information base will take the strain off all persons involved. Service times can be reduced, thereby optimising the troubleshooting efforts of the help desk staff. The employees are able to obtain information themselves in a short time. This enhances customer satisfaction as requests can be answered more quickly. Tickets are resolved instead of just being managed. A problem of many ticket systems is that they focus on the management of tickets, not on their resolution. But solutions can be achieved easily by making an updated IT documentation available to the IT department.
And nevertheless, it is possible to maintain the segregation of duties in the IT department. A support staff member does not need admin permissions to IT systems. Fewer permissions and accesses to the consoles enhance IT security. This also directly increases the availability of your IT landscape, as users may not log on to a productive IT system just for getting information. The same applies to IT managers as well as examiners and auditors: they do not have to log on actively to the productive network. The administrator will like that.
Make your IT documentation transparent
This approach can even be of invaluable help when outsourcing IT services. Especially when dealing with external service providers, it is often not clear who exactly logs on to your systems. But the IT manager must know and document this – and be able to furnish proof. This is why an up-to-date IT documentation is required when you resort to external service providers.
Here, the premium Docusnap documentation suite can provide perfect support. The time-controlled, automated inventory process for your IT landscape allows you to provide current information to the IT staff at any time. By assigning appropriate rights in the software, you can determine which employee will have access to which information. It is further possible to automatically update reports and overviews in the background. Everybody gets the information they need, and the number of logins to the respective IT systems is minimised. This allows you to ensure a segregation of duties between the help desk and the IT administration.