Operations contacts and responsibilities

Every organization needs to have layers of support and advice for control responsibilities for day-to-day operations. You need to plan for casual support and expert support.

Some suggestions for assigning control responsibilities are:

• Have a user liaison group answer day-to-day application-program questions, track problems, and monitor service.

  Make the user liaison group the primary contact for the end user and for IMS operations. Encourage the user liaison group to be part of recovery decisions.

• Have a database-administration contact for recovery, design change evaluation, and database monitoring and analysis.
• Shield the MTO from most end-user inquiries so that the MTO can concentrate on availability, system status, and production statistics. Use other supervisory terminals to distribute the workload. Take advantage of automated operator programs to initiate MTO commands and reduce operator tedium.
• Establish system operations contacts for VTAM® operation and hardware problems.
• Have a security contact for access problems. Other duties could be password and security maintenance, as well as violation monitoring.
• Have a monitoring and performance analysis coordinator who draws upon specialists for detailed studies.

These suggested contacts might only be suitable for prime shift or peak production hours. You should plan a contact list for other times, such as production cycle overruns and off-shift periods.