Knowledge and information management is one of the building blocks in an effective Operations department. It is really important to get a content management system in place before starting to build a production system. If you DO NOT do this, you and your team will suffer from the following:
- equipment inventory details will be stored only in your Purchase Orders, most likely kept in your mailbox
- low level design details can be found only in emails asking to perform cable wiring, or will be lost at all
- many versions of systems design documents will be managed in emails or in locally stored documents, making it almost impossible to trace down and identify the latest versions
- the documentation for managed systems will simply not exist since there is no place to store it
- and many other problems related to the lack of a central place to store and manage all required information about the system
