Provide a Reliable and Automated Permission Reconciliation Process Following Type System Updates

Organizations that maintain large and complex DOORS Next deployments must regularly perform Type System updates to support evolving business and engineering processes. In our environment, Type System changes are performed approximately once per month and frequently result in permission inconsistencies that require significant manual intervention to identify, troubleshoot, and correct.

Following Type System updates, permissions may become intermittently unavailable or behave unexpectedly for end users. This creates a substantial administrative burden and negatively impacts user productivity across the organization.

We would like IBM to provide a more reliable mechanism that preserves and validates permissions during Type System updates, or alternatively provide automated tools that can detect, reconcile, and repair permission-related inconsistencies after a Type System change.

The current process creates significant operational overhead and business disruption:

• Each occurrence requires extensive planning, coordination, validation, and remediation activities.

• The issue consumes an estimated 200+ hours of effort per event within our organization alone.

• More than 3,300 users are impacted when permissions become unavailable or inconsistent.

• User productivity is disrupted while administrators investigate and restore access.

• The issue generates a high volume of support requests and user frustration.

• Multiple large business units are affected, and the impact extends beyond a single deployment.

In addition to our current environment, the same challenge is expected to affect all of the deployments across the organization as Type System updates are performed.

Requested Enhancement

We would like IBM to consider one or more of the following enhancements:

• Automatic validation of permissions before and after Type System updates.

• Automated repair or reconciliation of permission inconsistencies introduced by Type System changes.

• Administrative reports that identify affected users, roles, and permissions.

• Pre-update impact analysis that highlights potential permission-related risks.

• Improved tooling to reduce manual effort associated with post-update validation and correction.

• Enhanced logging and diagnostics to quickly identify permission discrepancies.

Business Value

Implementing this enhancement would:

• Significantly reduce administrative effort associated with Type System maintenance.

• Minimize disruption to thousands of users.

• Improve confidence when performing Type System updates.

• Reduce downtime and support costs.

• Enable large enterprises and government deployments to adopt and maintain ELM more efficiently.

• Improve overall user experience and system reliability during configuration changes.

Customer Impact Statement

We need to perform Type System updates circa monthly. This issue costs us easily over 200 hours each time between direct costs associated with correcting them, formal planning/coordination of execution, the impact it has on the 3300+ Users when
permissions get intermittently lost (and frustration it generates) etc.