At the beginning of the year, millions of people make New Year resolutions in hopes to improve their health, relationships, and overall well-being. In the workplace, the new year marks the time to review progress, milestones, and improvement of the previous year. For IT, the beginning of the year is a great time for a status update and a little bit of cleaning up. Employees are usually still on holidays and the number of issues has not yet picked up. Therefore, it is the ideal time to perform the following IT tasks that will help you start the year on the right foot.

Here are the top 5 tasks IT should make their New Year resolutions:

1. Perform An Audit

Start the year by performing an internal audit of your IT assets. For your hardware assets, this process will identify expired warranties. For your software assets, this process is a great opportunity to collect all proof of purchases that may have been left in file-sharing software or email inboxes. Then, collect them in one central location. It will help you identify what you may be missing and be prepared for vendor audits.

2. Clean Up Cloud Subscriptions

It may be some time since you’ve gone through your cloud subscriptions- a whole year, maybe. The number of cloud subscriptions can accumulate quickly. Before letting them accumulate for a whole other year, determine which subscriptions are not being used and check if they are still needed. If you don’t have an Enterprise App Store, make sure the subscriptions are meeting organization standards that may have changed over the course of a year.  Also, check if there are similar subscriptions that you can combine with one vendor as opposed to dealing with several vendors for similar services. As a result, you can potentially save on quantity discounts and eliminate the possibility of confusing employees.

3. Review Knowledge Base Articles

Take some time to review your Knowledge Base (KB) articles. After a year of dealing with a variety of issues, you will have a better idea of what articles people need or what articles you need to update. Your organization might have updated processes or policies that affect your KB as well. In addition, consider new technology that your organization might be using or new government legislation that affects the accuracy of your Knowledge Base.

4. Reconcile Active Directory

Update your organization’s active directory, if it is not already done automatically. Employees leave, arrive or change departments. There can be a lot of changes in just a short period of time. Having an updated active directory is important for employees, IT purchasing decisions and affect several IT processes like onboarding.

5. Reflect On Goals

Finally, it is your turn to look back on the previous year and reflect on the IT department’s goals. Rather than analyzing at a high level, access your Service Level Agreements to find actionable data. Look up metrics like average response time, the number of issues closed and which departments used up most of the resources. Compare them to your objectives and see where you can improve. It’s a great way to start the year on the right foot!

The best resolutions are those you make and stick to. Whether you need to do these tasks manually or have an IT Management Platform, like VIZOR, to help the process, we believe you can do it!

Good luck!

Here are the resolutions in a list format