Welcome to the Incident Xpress User &
Admin Guide.
This guide will help your organization get
the most out of its investment in Incident Xpress (iX).
Features and Benefits
Incident Xpress's functionality is split
into the following sections:
- Management
- Data Entry
- Investigation
- Corrective Action
- Searching
- Creating Reports
- Performing Analysis
- Administration
Let's take a look at each of these sections, and how Incident Xpress fits into
each one.
Management
Incident Xpress gives your organization the
ability to manage incidents in a fully consistent manner, making it simple to
locate a single detail, perform complex analysis, and create conclusions which enable
you to make changes that reduce the odds of reoccurrence.
Data Entry
Incident Xpress makes extensive use of lookup
lists to populate data fields in incident records. This feature provides room
for customization and is critical to maintaining consistency in data entry.
Investigation
Incident management is an active process.
It requires interviewing the people involved to determine exactly what
happened, who was involved/responsible, any action taken against those
responsible, and what steps were taken to reduce or mitigate the risk of a
similar incident happening in the future. Incident Xpress's functionality was
designed to complement the investigative process.
Serious incidents are often beyond the
scope of routine users to complete. Those incidents often include interviewing
the people involved to determine exactly what happened and who was responsible.
An experienced investigator can draw conclusions and recommend appropriate
action to reduce the probability that a similar incident will occur in the
future.
Corrective Action
Identifying a corrective action is
necessary before an incident can be considered closed. For example, if a crime
were committed, could enhanced physical security reduce the probability of the
same crime happening again? Incident Xpress helps you to identify the appropriate
corrective action.
Many incidents are routine, but others highlight
weaknesses in policies, procedures, or physical security; or, they result in
action being taken against an involved person or legal entity. When appropriate
action is taken, an organization is demonstrating it cares and takes steps to
protect its physical assets, employees, customers, and reputation.
Searching
Incident Xpress offers a thorough search
function that makes it easy to locate any incident record, or combination of
incident records, in the database.
Creating Reports
Incident Xpress has a robust reporting capability
that seamlessly integrates with its Search and Analysis functions.
You can create highly customized reports
based on several different inputs including date, frequency, incident class,
and other relevant data points. Search criteria can easily be pinned to your
personal Dashboard or the system-wide Reports section for quick reference and
editing.
An incident
report can be printed, but attachments must be opened and printed separately.
The information entered in Incident Xpress's
database is immensely valuable. Knowing when and why most incidents of a
specific type occur, or the frequency of specific incidents can lead to changes
to procedures and effective deployment of security resources to reduce the
number and impact of future incidents.
Administration
NOTE: Every organization, no matter how small, must have a backup administrator with all administration privileges. Here are some of the common terms you'll find
in this manual, with a description of what each term refers to.
Important Terms
Audit
Audit is the function that provides
transparency into Incident Xpress's activities and relevant changes within the
system. Audit keeps an ongoing record of user activities within the application
from changes to incidents, to searches performed, to changes to admin functions
such as lookup lists, workgroups or users.
The Audit function enhances the credibility of the
recording of an incident—a report of an edit-by-edit history can be
created—which might be necessary if an incident record becomes evidence in a
court case.
Configuration
Configuration refers to personalizing the Incident
Xpress application for a specific organization. For example, the creation of
lookup lists and the creation of workgroups.
Corrective Action
Recording Corrective Action demonstrates the
responsible actions taken to mitigate the chance or severity of a similar
incident occurring in the future.
Legal Entity
Incident Xpress allows the tracking of
involved legal entities. Examples of legal entities may be the owner of the
subscription or a contractor company.
Lookups
Lookups are lists created by the System Administrator
which are used to populate the drop-down lists users select from when entering an
incident in Incident Xpress.
Navigation
Navigation refers to how a user selects
options from menus, dialog boxes, and pop-ups that enable them to move around
in the application.
System Administrator
The System Administrator (or SA) is the
person in your organization who has technical oversight of the entire Incident
Xpress application. The System Administrator configures the application to suit
their organization's needs, including setting up workgroups and assigning user privileges.
NOTE: It is recommended that the SA always have a backup person who can access the application in the event the SA becomes unavailable for any reason.
Users
A user is someone who has a unique user
account in Incident Xpress. Users have the access privileges appropriate for
the workgroup they belong to.
Workgroup
Workgroup describes how users with the same
privileges are organized together. For example, the Administration workgroup could
have two users, the SA and his/her backup. Both users would have identical
privileges.