IBM Cognos Command Center - Automation Life Cycle Management (LCM)

Resolving The Problem

IBM Cognos Command Center Automation Life Cycle Management has several benefits. With LCM, you can track the history of objects as they evolve over time, manage the migration of objects on the path from development to production, and create an audit trail. LCM is about managing risk over time, and about moving forward in well-controlled steps in a risk-adverse way. Risk-managed progress and evolution is the key to user success, and it is one of the foundations of SCC.

SCC, with its Repository, places all of 'programming' and configuration in a sustainable and secure database. The SCC audit records, labeling and export/import provide a wide variety of ways for the user to take snapshots that can be used to revert or migrate Ecosystems and their associated Processes and File Resources.

Here are the steps to understanding LCM.

Step #1 -  Look at the two ways of setting up Automation Life Cycle Management.

There are two ways of setting up Life Cycle Management. One method is to use a single Ecosystem with multiple Environments. This is only recommended if your Environments represent, for example,   geographical regions such as Europe and Asia. The disadvantage of a single Ecosystem is that a change in File Resources affects all Environments.

The other method of setting up LCM is to use more than one Ecosystem, each with its own Environment. For example, you could have a development Ecosystem and a production Ecosystem, each separated from the other.

Step #2 -  Look at Best Practices for using Automation Life Cycle Management.

Best practices for Life Cycle Management call for using multiple Ecosystems, each representing a lifecycle stage. The Ecosystems may reside on the same server, or on different servers. This allows you, for example, to edit and test in a development Ecosystem, and then use Export and Import to push the changes to the production Ecosystem.

Step #3 - Look at Using Labels and Export / Import with Life Cycle Management.


Labels and the export / import processes are crucial parts of Life Cycle Management. A new Label points to the current set of Processes and File Resources in an Ecosystem. The objects that the Label points to can be exported and subsequently imported into another Ecosystem. In the example above, we export from the FinPlanDev Ecosystem and import into the FinPlanProd Ecosystem. Importing creates a copy of the Processes and File Resources. This copy can be promoted to become the latest version.

Step #4 -  Look at using Labels as Life Cycle Management time machines.You can use Labels as Life Cycle Management time machines. Simply promote a Label to restore an Environment to its previous state. Also, it is easy to undo an import using the Label that was automatically created when the import took place.