ISAWS System Support (ISS) Division/Unit and Staff Functions

A short description of each area follows below:

• Application Development and Support
• Customer Support Services
• Technical Support

Application Development and Support

Application Development and Support

The Application Support team is responsible for maintaining the MAPPER based ISAWS Application, WTW Application and Interfaces developed within these Applications. The team is responsible for implementing changes and new regulations in the various subsystems as needs arise. The team is also responsible for Special Projects, such as, implementing the Ad-hoc reporting relational database.

Application Testing

The Application Testing team is responsible for validating the accuracy and efficiency of system changes while maintaining system integrity and regulatory compliance through the development and maintenance of an Integrated Uniform Testing Infrastructure and Methodology, founded on software industry best practices, to deliver quality system changes while preserving data integrity.

Database Administrator (DBA)

The DBA Group maintains the Application Database of the 35 ISAWS counties, spread over multiple Production MAPPERs on the Unisys Mainframes and Oracle Database. They also help in maintaining the security of the system, help set up the Test-environments for testing, and are responsible for moving runs/MCR’s from the development area to various testing areas.

Customer Support Services

ISAWS Analysis Unit

The ISAWS Analysis Unit is responsible for providing statistical and management analysis to the ISAWS Project. This includes development of databases for internal management reporting and policy documentation, review of internal processes, and providing the tools for forecasting project needs.

Customer Support

Customer Support is responsible for activities historically represented by the Help Desk and User Support Teams.

Help Desk Activities
Customer Support manages and resolves problems with the ISAWS and WTW applications. These problems are reported via a TIPS ticket. The team resolves tickets, documents system issues, coordinates minor fixes, submits Maintenance Change Requests (MCR's) as necessary and attaches issues to pending MCR's. Customer Support also provides after office hours support for batch processes such as Benefit Issuance and Management Reporting, and additional projects as needed.

User Support Activities
Customer Support also acts as the liaison between ISAWS System Support and ISAWS Counties, including the County Help Desks. The Customer Support Team is considered the communication hub for ISAWS System Support (ISS). With the assistance of ISS staff and teams, Customer Support provides the ISAWS County users with answers to a variety of System and Project questions. Customer Support also provides training to County and ISS staff on an assortment of topics, develops and maintains user manuals and training curriculum, assists the application development team with writing standard screen and error helps, and participates in the MCR Quality Assurance processes.

Customer Support Programmers
Customer Support Programmers are responsible for providing application support to the Customer Support Team upon receipt of a problem ticket. Some examples of System Support's responsibilities are:

• Completing "Quick Fixes" (which are small in functionality scope system fixes)
• Performing technical analysis behind a functional change that a county found to not be within the scope of the regulation
• Making database updates in response to a program error
• Performing technical analysis on issues that have the potential to become MCR’s.

Technical Support

Technical Support

Technical Support staff is responsible for maintaining and supporting the Unisys systems for the ISAWS/WTW Applications, monitoring the performance of the systems, and maintaining the hardware and software of the systems. Within this group is a PC/LAN support team where the primary responsibility is to the end users of the system.

Production Control

Production Control is responsible for moving the new versions of runs to production and ensuring the correct version is moved. They monitor file transfers to the counties and return files received from counties. They are also responsible for fixing EOM issues.

New Services

ISAWS New Services / Relocation is a liaison between ISAWS Counties and OSI to provide assistance in new site implementation, existing site expansion or relocation, and change in setup of network devices.

OSI-ISAWS Help Desk (NOC)

OSI-ISAWS Help Desk, or Network Operating Center, consists of a group of systems analysts, software specialists and network planning and design staff responsible for providing technical support to the online counties and the Maintenance Center. They handle questions dealing with WAN (Wide Area Network) or LAN (Local Area Network) problems, connectivity issues, circuit problems, printer and terminal problems and ISAWS application problems such as when the application goes down (out of service).