Reply to post: It is sad how little documentation most environments have

It is sad how little documentation most environments have

In my experience, a sizable majority have no useful documentation. Sure, your CMDB (one of them, since unfortunately in too many cases there is more than one!) may have a brief description like "Oracle DB server for application XXX" but that hardly helps. If you're lucky you'll have an entry for the database itself, which will hopefully extend to all the way up to the application, and tell what that application depends on to function and what else out there depends on this application to function.

Generally where you find something like this, it was done when the application was originally set up - the architect or implementation team had a clear view of how all the pieces fit together, so it was known. The problem is over time, new functionality gets added here and there, or pieces are swapped out for something else, and nothing gets updated, or at least not completely updated. So the information is not only incomplete, it is dangerously incorrect if you rely on it.

It is 10x worse in a bespoke environment, because eventually the people who really know it move on, at which point all hope of ever fully understanding it is lost even if they maintained perfect documentation until then. Updating documentation is the sort of job that never gets properly handed off, and management never knows/cares to insure it gets done when the guy doing it has moved on. It is more important to get tasks done that will impress upper management than to do the basic housekeeping that they don't know about.