Server Documentation Template

Our IT department is at best a bastion of laziness. No one is willing to accept responsibility for anything, and this occurs at the CIO level, all the way down through our 40 member staff.  Because of this, we have 150+ servers with little or no documentation.  This includes hardware, software, and interaction with other servers.  Being the ambitious and bored employee that I am, I am hoping to be able to take care of this documentation myself on my own initiative.  There are two issues that I have:

First, if word gets out that I am doing this, management will explicitly tell me that I cannot continue.  Again, from the CIO down, they feel that these sorts of things should be management only issues and that the technical people employed should only perform the tasks that have been explicitly handed down by them.

Second, I am having difficulty determining the best method of documenting the servers.  I would really like to do this in XML, using PHP or Perl to parse the server configurations into flat files that can be accessed and printed into nicely formatted documents.

Does anyone have a template for server documentation that I may be able to use as the basis of my documentation method?  Does anyone had any advice for how to gather the information I need as well as make a useful resource for the other technicians while flying under the radar on this?

Thanks in advance.