For Newcomers to INCONTROL Products and the IOA Environment

The Integrated Operations Architecture (IOA) is the software architecture of the INCONTROL family of Automated Systems Operations products. The purpose of IOA is to establish an operations software environment in which the goal of true unattended operations can be realized.

You interact with all INCONTROL products through the use of a single user-friendly online interface. The interface gives you the capability to control and administer all functions in the automated data center environment from a single terminal. This single user interface is available in every online environment, including TSO/native, TSO/ISPF, CA-ROSCOE, CICS, IMS/DC, COM-PLETE, and VTAM.

All INCONTROL products use a single integrated database containing all production information relating to the operation of all data center functions. This single database facilitates the automation of the links, and the scheduling of events, among the INCONTROL products.

All INCONTROL products are centrally scheduled and coordinated by a single scheduling facility. In this manner, you can specify the entire process through a single scheduling screen. For example, through that single scheduling screen you can

• schedule a production job
• conduct balancing and quality control of the output report for a job
• restart a job in case of job failure
• direct the printing and distribution of reports

Further, the single scheduling facility enables the specification of dependent relationships across functions. That is, the occurrence of an event in one automated function, such as the printing of a report, can be made dependent on the occurrence of an event in another function, such as the successful finish of a job.

INCONTROL products are distributed on one installation tape, with an accompanying unified installation process. An automatic maintenance procedure keeps all INCONTROL products at the same maintenance level.