It's hard to say without knowing what type of organization that you're joining. Either you're going to a well run IT shop (good, but boring), or entering a lan

It's hard to say without knowing what type of organization that you're joining. Either you're going to a well run IT shop (good, but boring), or entering a land of chaos and dysfunction (bad, but not boring). If you're going to a place of chaos and dysfunction, your mindset should really be about triage. To get things under control you need to be able to quickly mitigate any kind of problem, which usually means trying to make everything as homogenous as possible. Try to limit the number of permutations of systems and the software which runs on them. Use imaging and devops tools to stamp this homogeneity out across the organization. When I was a sysadmin, I would generally have a centralized, backed up file server, and any desktop/laptop that someone used would be nuked (using Ghost) if someone went wrong with it. You don't really have time to do detailed analysis of failure causes, so just get everything back up and running as quickly as possible. This will probably annoy many people, but it lets you get a grip on things relatively quickly. On the other hand, if you're going to a good, but boring shop, you should be doing more detailed fault analysis and theorizing how things could potentially break. You then spend most of your time trying to implement things to stop breakages from happening. This is where you probably want to be as an organization, however a lot of managers probably aren't going to want to pay for it. IT is a cost center, after all, so if you get it beyond the point where you're out of dysfunction mode, many managers are content to deal with the occasional catastrophic failure.