Why do you need it?

Operational Support

Imagine a process abort, in the middle of your production run, that is new to your environment in which you do not have recovery procedures. Processing is halted and billing production is in jeopardy. As you know customer service will suffer, revenue recovery is now delayed and the integrity of your data is in question. Although, we hope these situations do not occur frequently, they are more commonplace with today’s open systems that are integrated with the organization and to partners. In normal circumstances, the production specialist would immediately contact an on-call support engineer. Because this is an uncharted problem, the engineer would need to dial into the system and try to determine the problem using educated analysis – assuming they have the experience to complete the problem analysis. When uncertainty arises, the engineer would then call a back-up engineer, escalate to management, or start attempted resolution through trial and error.

Some utilities may enter into support agreements with their current software vendors to add a layer of protection. However, these support lines often are limited to the vendor’s software – not the data or the infrastructure. Each problem that you encounter will grow in complexity, as your system ages and matures. Simple software aborts could be tied to both infrastructure and data problems that are introduced by input errors or program logic problems.

Now what if you could have made a call when the abort occurred and spoke with an experienced production analyst that has the ability to help solve your problem and keep your production run on track? This is exactly what CISLine® is here to do. Our 24 hour support line is staffed with proven analysts who have – through personal experience – been in many of the situations that you will face. We have networked some of the industry’s leading analysts that not only “know” the software, but have experienced the resolution of these problems in “real-live” production environments. Lastly, we have worked on many of your platform providers such as Oracle, IBM, Sun, EMC and DB2 in finding the best solutions to avoid these situations from reoccurring.

Professional Support

But to say that CISLine® is only a 24 hour critical support line is limiting. We have staffed the support line to also provide as-needed business and technical analysts that can assist you in code management, project support, performance issues, go-live readiness, and problem investigation. If you have a meeting scheduled to discuss a new functionality need, by simply calling CISLine®, you could have one of our professionals join. These professionals bring knowledge and experience to the discussion to help you understand current functionality within the system and provide potential solutions to real business problems.

Whether you are rolling out new functionality, applying a code correction, making a version migration, performing software or infrastructure performance analysis, need a tactical or long-term process enhancement, implementing procedure controls, need to understand your data and access points or simply just have a question, we are here to help and answer your questions.