Support & operations · Practice guide

Keep a useful list of your digital services and their owners

Illustrative situation

The organisation has a list of laptops but no maintained record of websites, domains, software subscriptions and integration owners. A useful digital register tells the practice what each service does, who owns it and what it depends on. A list of laptops will not answer who manages a booking form, domain or software subscription.

Read the guide Make your action list
Healthcare website support desk with a system checklist, telephone and orange notebook.
Know who to call and what help your support arrangement includes.

What this means for your practice

Create a digital service inventory that connects each asset to its business purpose, accountable role and important dependencies. Keep it useful for actual decisions.

An example to discuss with your team

Use the register to identify who owns a failing form integration and which service depends on it. Add missing fields only when they resolve a real gap.

Healthcare website maintenance with infrastructure, a status panel, tools and an operational checklist.
Monitor the useful journey, not just whether a server responds.
Healthcare backup and recovery illustrated by storage copies, an archive folder and a restoration route.
Test whether a backup can restore a usable service.

How to review the arrangement

Choose a fictional failed form connection and ask the team to find its owner and supplier from the register. Which missing details prevent action? Add fields that solve that practical gap. The inventory should help with support and renewal decisions rather than become an exhaustive document nobody maintains.

Keep the register useful in a real conversation

Choose a few decisions the register should support: finding help for a broken form, reviewing a subscription or arranging a supplier change. Record the information needed for those tasks, including purpose, responsible role and the important providers or connections involved. Avoid collecting technical detail nobody is expected to maintain.

Ask a covering colleague to follow a fictional support question using the register. Can they identify the service, the person responsible and the right contact? If not, add the missing practical information. Include tools bought by individual teams, because they can become important to the practice without appearing in an older project list. Give entries a review point and a route for reporting discrepancies. A smaller maintained list is more useful than a comprehensive inventory that was accurate once but no longer reflects the systems staff depend on.

How to check the result

Measure active services with verified ownership and dependency information.

Turn reading into a next step

Your action checklist

Work through these checks with your team or supplier. Tick the ones you have resolved and leave unknowns open.

Checks to discuss

Record what you know, what is still missing and the answer you need from your team or supplier.

Use project decisions only, without personal, patient or confidential details. Entries stay in this page and are not submitted to Kay & Co. Copy or download before leaving; this page does not save your notes.

Further reading

These sources provide background for the topic. The practice examples and checklist are illustrative planning suggestions from Kay & Co.

Related guides

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