Why are we unique?

Recommended Methodology

The beginning of any issue is the declaration of an incident by an end-user. Incidents are the result of failures or errors in the IT infrastructure. The cause of Incidents may be apparent and the cause may be addressed without the need for further investigation, resulting in a repair, a Work-around or a request for change (RFC) to remove the error. Any Request For Change is analyzed, evaluated in terms of its economic and organizational impact before a decision is made by the change Advisory Board (CAB) on whether or not to perform the modification. When an initial request is taken into the system, it becomes a Maintenance Report [MR]. This allows you to identify relevant components and track the work done on them. The change log provides detailed information about all the modifications that are made.

A standard feature of ARCAD-Customer creates user documents. You can make these documents available directly to users, or you can link them with a help-desk tool. Document entry and monitoring can be accomplished via three different user interfaces: 

• A 5250 interface, practical for users who still work with this system
• A Rich Client interface, provided as an executable to be installed on all PC workstations (this application is RCP, or Rich Client Platform)
• A Plug-in interface for Eclipse/WDSC or RAD (Rational Application Developer) development environments. 

Linking with Service-desk

If a company already has a service-desk tool, it may be time to consider automatic creation of Request For Change using the provided API system. If a company does not have this tool, it is time to set up ARCAD-Customer, which has this link as a standard feature. 

Linking with ARCAD-Skipper 

The Request-Tracking is directly linked to ARCAD-Skipper software configuration management tool and thus the link is established between the Incident and the modification of the component in both directions.

After assessing the request, the manager enters a Maintenance Report to describe the results of assessment and assign the case to a developer. The manager can then decide to either open a new version, in urgent cases, or assign the file to a current version.