“Our foundation of systems documentation will begin with the ‘ORC’, the Operations Readiness Checklist.” – Jonathan Merrill @ LANVERA
How are we doing systems documentation? Today, its spreadsheets by system, contained in a knowledgebase article, updated by the knowledge champion for that system. This is a fairly antiquated yet reliable way to manage this type of documentation. The ORC has an interesting history and has evolved for the years. Here is an abbreviated account.
The birth of the original ORC came from former Santander Consumer USA VP, IT Operations and Engineering, James Brewster in 2013. “I want a checklist that every system must have completed before it goes into support.”
The original ORC was a simple checklist of questions to answer: Name of servers, did we back it up, was it security vuln scanned, etc.. This Q&A went through three iterations as different groups asked for information to be added. The simple checklist turned into a seven tab spreadsheet. The reception by engineers and customers alike in the end was… “awful.”
The next major iteration of the ORC, dubbed ORC-lite, had it’s most influence by former Santander Consumer USA Director of Datacenter Architecture, John Thomas. Feedback took the ORC in a different direction and focused on systems configuration documentation and support capability. In other words, an engineer-friendly quick to fill out document focusing on support. That change exploded it’s adoption and was embraced meaningfully across all IT Operations’ leaders.
Victim of it’s success, the ORC came onto audit’s radar when systems documentation became an IT control item, requesting specific system configuration data. ORC-lite once again became a 7-tab worksheet through the many discussions with these teams.
Today’s ORC is the end result of those deliberations. John Thomas commented this was some of our best work. A lot of hard work did go in, but the goal was never a spreadsheet. Our search for an automated system documentation was the vision. Could ServiceNow’s discovery engine and business service mapping serve? I won’t be there to find out.
Nevertheless, the ORC is a great tool for organizations needing a starting point for system documentation. The ORC lives on!
Link: ORC 1.0 “template”.
\\ JMM