Booklet: Development and Acquisition Section: Maintenance Subsection: Documentation Maintenance

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Documentation provides valuable descriptions of an organization’s development, acquisition, and operating environments and significantly enhances an organization’s ability to administer, operate, and maintain technology systems. Primary advantages for end users involve having access to operation manuals and on-line application help features. Documentation enhances administrators’ and technicians’ ability to maintain and update systems efficiently and to identify and correct programming defects.

Developing and maintaining current, accurate documentation can be complicated, time consuming, and expensive. However, standardized documentation procedures and the use of automated documentation software facilitate an organization’s ability to maintain accurate documentation.

Documentation standards should identify primary documentation custodians and detail document authoring, approving, and formatting requirements. Personnel should document all changes to system, application, and configuration documentation according to prescribed standards. Additionally, management should control access to documentation libraries with appropriate library and version controls.

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