2. Planning for Installation and Use of CA MICS › 2.1 Personnel Assignment and Preparation
2.1 Personnel Assignment and Preparation
The CA MICS system is a large, interrelated application
system, similar to ones that are run by your installation for
major users of your computing facilities. The CA MICS system
revolves around its database, and database architecture
requires additional operational considerations. As a result,
a regular schedule of operation must be followed, and a
thorough understanding of the update, archive, restart, and
reporting processes is required.
The CA MICS system provides an organization with many
benefits. You must, however, recognize that the operation
and care of the system is important, if not critical, to its
effective application in satisfying your information handling
needs.
There are two distinct job responsibilities related to the
care and feeding of CA MICS: system administration and
information coordination. These two areas may be delegated
to different individuals, or may be assumed by the same
person, depending upon your management's wishes.
The CA MICS System Administrator should assume the following
responsibilities:
o Liaison between your installation and CA Technical
Support to handle problem identification and
resolution, standard maintenance, etc.
o Keeping the installation's copy of the CA MICS System
Administrator's Guide (SAG) up-to-date by correctly
filing correspondence from CA Technical Support, and
also keeping required system-specific notations (for
example, user modifications) in this manual. Of
course, besides maintaining the SAG, the CA MICS
System Administrator must make those changes called
for in the correspondence which are his or her
responsibility, and make sure all other persons are
made aware of information relevant to their concerns.
o Ensuring the correct operation of the required daily,
weekly, monthly, and yearly functions. This requires
checking the runs to determine that they successfully
completed, and if not, carrying out the necessary
restart/recovery steps in a timely manner to restore
CA MICS to operational status.
o Application of maintenance releases, improvements, and
changes to the CA MICS system at your installation.
o Installation of new CA MICS products.
o Management of user modifications to CA MICS, including
the approval of such modifications, their
implementation with regard to CA MICS maintenance
policies and guidelines, and the logging and
documentation of the modifications.
o Responsibility for the operation of the CA MICS Job
Scheduling Facility, System Restart Facility, and
MICF.
The CA MICS Information Coordinator should assume the
following responsibilities:
o Definition and implementation of a plan for the
distribution, use, and collection of feedback about
the standard reports provided by CA MICS.
o Definition and integration of user-written exceptions
into the CA MICS Exception reporting facility.
o Definition and provision of user-written reports from
the CA MICS database.
o Authorization and control of the use of MICF.
o Consultation and interpretation of the CA MICS
standard and user-written reports for users.
How and to whom the position(s) report within an organization
is the responsibility of each installation to define. We
feel that the System Administration responsibility should
rest with the organization closest to the day-to-day use of
the system, which in most organizations would be the computer
performance and evaluation department/group. The Information
Coordinator may also follow this path or may report higher in
the organization, closer to, or directly reporting to, the
director of data processing.
The personnel resource commitment required to staff CA MICS
is a function of a number of things:
o The number of installations and/or CPUs encompassed
under CA MICS control.
o The number of CA MICS products that are to be used.
o The number of uses for which CA MICS will be employed,
including performance evaluation, system tuning,
capacity planning, data center chargeback or
accounting, standards enforcement, security,
management progress reporting, adhoc inquiry, etc.
Installation
The actual installation, including preparation work,
attending the one-week CA MICS class, installation planning,
actual installation, and system certification generally
requires three to six weeks.
Operation
The operation of CA MICS on a daily, weekly, monthly, and
yearly basis requires constant supervision, even though the
system is designed for minimum operational impact. The
CA MICS System Administrator will be required to expend 15-30
minutes per day on the average in certifying the system's
successful operation and database integrity.
Maintenance
The actual maintenance of the CA MICS system, in terms of
applying distributed corrections, improvements, new releases,
etc., should require less than one day per month on the
average.
Use
How each organization chooses to apply and use CA MICS is up
to them. It is our recommendation that the CA MICS
Information Coordinator dedicate 50-100% of their time to the
use of CA MICS in the role of "information specialist".
The time spent is 100% productive use of the individual's
efforts toward the performance, capacity planning, tracking,
and organizational problem solving, and is a personnel cost
that is incurred one way or the other, whether CA MICS is
installed or not.
The following tasks should be accomplished in order to
prepare the CA MICS System Administrator and Information
Coordinator for their responsibilities. They are repeated
here from Section 2 for convenience.
Task 1-1: Establish and staff the positions of CA MICS
System Administrator and CA MICS Information
Coordinator positions.
Task 1-2: Have these people attend CA MICS courses:
o CA MICS Concepts and Facilities
o Implementing CA MICS
Task 1-3: Have the assigned personnel review the
contents of the CA MICS System Administrator's
Guide (SAG) so that the latest information on
the state of the CA MICS system will be used
in succeeding tasks.
