3 Ways IT Glue Helps You Beat the Forgetting Curve
BY IT GLUE | January 21, 2020
The human brain is not an infallible machine. It’s prone to a plethora of psychological quirks and biases, and worst of all, it’s a victim of the Forgetting Curve. Just as the name implies, the curve illustrates the speed at which information fades into the recesses of the mind, before ultimately disappearing forever.
One study demonstrated that within 24 hours, 50-80% of new information is forgotten if the information isn’t engaged with (contemplated or used).1 By day 30, only 2-3% is remembered—a mere fraction.1 At first this seems like a shortcoming of human cognition, but one that’s developed to help us cope with the flood of useless information we’re faced with on a daily basis. By not engaging with a piece of information, you’re telling your brain that it’s not a pertinent detail that needs to be retained. More hardware can be added to a server to store more information, but unfortunately, not the brain.
Forgetfulness is the enemy of process, efficiency, and security. Your savior? Documentation. IT Glue has a host of features that more than compensate for the Forgetting Curve.
1. Relationship Mapping
Feature: Related Items
Information rarely exists in isolation, and more likely exists within a web of relevant connections. Whether it’s your information, or a client’s information, effective documentation requires the ability to make the connections between relevant pieces of information.
Relationship mapping within IT Glue involves creating logical, two-way connections between pieces of information (assets), be they vendors, licences, network devices, contacts, domains, passwords, standard operating procedures, or licenses.
Establishing the relationships between assets early on means you don’t have to remember the minute details such as what router connects to which switch, and which switch is connected to which workstation. It’s all displayed within the “Related Items” section, giving you access to relevant information for a given task, and facilitating the flow of work.
2. Compartmentalization/Categorization)
Feature: Tags
Just like how you might compartmentalize your feelings and emotions, IT Glue allows you to compartmentalize information. Don’t go confusing this with the Related Fields feature, though. Tags allow you to designate a “kind” of information. Essentially, what this does is group assets, organizations, and users so you don’t have to remember what belongs together. This is a helpful feature in many scenarios, for example if you’d like to group a set of related licenses, procedures, devices, or passwords together and establish two-way links between all of them, the tag feature will get this done for you.
3. Reminders
Feature: Workflows
Things will be top of mind, only when they need to be. Flag types trigger predefined workflows that tell you when something needs to happen, and the specific steps to get it done. You can set workflows to be triggered by an event, or schedule them to take place. Not only does this let you establish a process that works and not have to remember all the individual steps, it also ensures that you don’t have to remember to pass this knowledge onto new techs during their onboarding.
Triggers can be when a Document is published/updated, when a Flag is added/updated/removed, or when a Password is added/updated, when a Domain, SSL, Configuration, or Flexible Asset is set to expire. Established workflows ensure that the person responsible for an action, automatically knows when and how to do it.
IT Glue’s award-winning documentation platform allows for efficient storage and retrieval of all the documentation you need to help managed service providers increase efficiency. Watch a demo today!
