ENMS User Interfaces...

Ever watch folks and how they use various applications? When you do some research around the science of Situation Awareness, you realize that human behavior in user interfaces is vital to understanding how to put information in front of users in ways that empowers the users inline with what they need.

In ENMS related systems, it is imperative that you present information in ways that empower users to understand situations and conditions beyond just a single node. While all of the wares vendors have been focused on delivering some sort of Root Cause Analysis, this may not be what is REALLY needed by the users. And dependent upon whether you are a Service Provider or an Enterprise, the rules may be different.

What I look for in applications and User Interfaces are ways to streamline the interaction versus being disruptive. If you are swapping a lot of screens, inherently look at your user. If they have to readjust their vision or posture, the UI is disrupting their flow.

For example, if the user is looking at an events display and they execute a function as part of the menu. This function produces a screen that overcomes the existing events display. If you watch your user, you will see them have to readjust to the screen change.

I feel like this is one of the primary reasons ticketing systems do not capture more real time data. It becomes too disruptive to keep changing screens so the user waits until later to update the ticket. Inherently, data is filtered and lost.

This has an effect on other processes. One is that if you are attempting to do BSM scorecards, ticket loading and resource management in near real time, you don’t have all of the data to complete your picture. In effect, situation awareness for management levels is skewed until the data is input.

The second effect to this is that if you’re doing continuous process improvement, especially with the incident and problem management aspects of ITIL, you miss critical data and time elements necessary to measure and improve upon.

Some folks have attempted to work around this by managing from ticket queues. So, you end up with one display of events and incoming situation elements and a second interface as the ticket interface. In order to try to make this even close to being effective, the tendency is to automatically generate tickets for every incoming event. Without doing a lot of intelligent correlation up front, automatic ticket generation can be very dangerous. Due diligence must be applied to each and every event that gets propagated or you may end up with false ticket generation or missed ticket opportunities.

Consider this as well. An Event Management system is capable of handling a couple thousand events pretty handily. A Ticketing system that handles 2000 ongoing tickets at one time changes the parameters of many ticketing systems.

Also, consider that in Remedy 7.5, the potential exists that each ticket may utilize 1GB or more of Database space. 2000 active tickets means you’re actively working across 2TB of drive / database space.

I like simple update utilities or popups that solicit information needed and move that information element back into the working Situation Awareness screen. For example, generating a ticket should be a simple screen to solicit data that is needed for the ticket that cannot be looked up directly or indirectly. Elements like ticket synopsis or symptom. Assignment to a queue or department. Changing status of a ticket.

Maps

Maps can be handy. But if you cannot overlay tools and status effectively or the map isn’t dynamic, it becomes more of a marketing display rather than a tool that you can use. This is even more prevalent when maps are not organized into hierarchies.

One of the main obstacles is the canvas. You can only place a certain amount of objects on a given screen. Some applications use scroll bars to enable you to get around. Others use a zoom in - zoom out capability where they scale the size of the icons and text according to the zoom. Others enable dragging the canvas. Another approach is to use a Hyperbolic display where analysis of detail is accomplished by establishing a moveable region under a higher level map akin to a magnifying glass over a desktop document.

3D displays get around the limitations of a small canvas a bit by using depth to position things in front or behind. However, 3D displays have to use techniques like LOD or Level of Details, or Fog to enable only more local objects are attended to, otherwise it has to render every object local and remote. This can be computationally intensive.

A couple of techniques I like in the 3D world are CAVE / Immersion displays and the concept of HUDs and Avatars. CAVE displays display your environment from several perspectives including top, bottom, front, left, right, and even behind. Movement is accomplished interacting with one screen and the other screens are synchronized to the main, frontal screen. This gives the user the effect of an immersive visual environment.

A HUD or heads up display enables you to present real time information directly in front of a user regardless of position or view.

The concept of an avatar is important in that if you have an avatar or user symbol, you can use that symbol to enable collaboration. In fact, your proximity to a given object may be used to help others collaborate and team up to solve problems.

Next week, I’ll discuss network layouts, transitioning, state and condition management, and morphing displays. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, I’ll take a shot at designing a hybrid, immersive 2D display that is true multiuser, and can be used as a solid tools and analysis visualization system.

BSM - Sounds EXCELLENT. YMMV

Business Service Management

OK. Here goes. First and foremost, I went hunting for a definition. Heres one from bitpipe that I thought sounded good.

ALSO CALLED: BSM
DEFINITION: A strategy and an approach for linking key IT components to the goals of the business. It enables you to understand and predict how technology impacts the business and how business impacts the IT infrastructure.

Sounds good, right?

When I analyze this definition, it looks very much like the definition for Situation Awareness. Check out the article on Wikipedia.

Situation awareness, or SA, is the perception of environmental elements within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future

So, I see where BSM as a strategy, creates a system where Situation Awareness for business as a function of IT services, can be achieved. In effect, BSM creates SA for business users through IT service practices.

Sounds all fine, good, and well in theory. But in practice, there are a ton of data sources. Some are database enabled. Some are Web services. Some are simple web content elements. How do you assemble, index, and align all this data from multiple sources, in a way that enables a business user to achieve situation awareness? How do you handle the data sources being timed wrong or failing?

The Road to Success

First of all, if you have a BSM strategy and you're buying or considering a purchase of a BSM framework, you need to seriously consider BI and a Data Architecture as well. All three technologies are interdependent. You have to organize your data, use it to create information, them make it suitable enough to be presented in a consistent way.

As you develop your data, you also develop your data model. With the data model will come information derivation and working through query and explain plans. In some instances, you need to look at a Data warehouse of sorts. You need to be able to organize and index your data to be presented in a timely and expeditious fashion so that the information helps to drive SA by business users.

A recent data warehouse sort od product has come to my attention. It is Greenplum. Love the technology. Scalable. But based on mature technology. My thoughts are about taking data from disparate sources, organizing that data, deriving new information, and indexing the data so that the reports you provide, can happen in a timely fashion.

Organizing your data around a data warehouse allows you to get around having to deal with multiple databases, multiple access mechanisms, and latency issues. And how easier it is to analyze cause and effect, derivatives, and patterns given you can search across these data sources from a single access. Makes true Business intelligence easier.

BSM products tend to be around creative SQL queries and dashboard/scorecard generation. You may not need to buy the entire cake to get a taste. Look for web generation utilities that can be used to augment your implementation and strategy.

And if you're implementing a BSM product, wouldn't it make sense to setup SLAs on performance, availability, and response time for the app and its data sources? This is the ONE App that could be used to set a standard and a precedence.

I tend to develop the requirements, then storyboard the dashboards and drill throughs. This gives you a way of visualizing holes in the dashboards and layouts but it also enables you to drive to completion. Developing dashboards can really drive scope creep if you don't manage it.
Storyboarding allows you to manage expectations and drive delivery.

NPS, Enterprise Management, and Situation Awareness

In the course of what I do, I have to sometimes take non-technical metrics and understand where implementation of technology - especially in the ENMS realm - applies toward achieving real business goals.

Recently, alot of Services based companies are working toward understanding and improving their Net Promoter Score or NPS. As part of this initiative, what can I do to realize the overall goal?

First, I went looking for a definition of NPS to understand the terms, conditions, and metrics related to this KPI. I found this definition:

"

What is Net Promoter?

Net Promoter® is both a loyalty metric and a discipline for using customer feedback to fuel profitable growth in your business. Developed by Satmetrix, Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld, the concept was first popularized through Reichheld's book The Ultimate Question, and has since been embraced by leading companies worldwide as the standard for measuring and improving customer loyalty.

The Net Promoter Score, or NPS®, is a straightforward metric that holds companies and employees accountable for how they treat customers. It has gained popularity thanks to its simplicity and its linkage to profitable growth. Employees at all levels of the organization understand it, opening the door to customer- centric change and improved performance.

Net Promoter programs are not traditional customer satisfaction programs, and simply measuring your NPS does not lead to success. Companies need to follow an associated discipline to actually drive improvements in customer loyalty and enable profitable growth. They must have leadership commitment, and the right business processes and systems in place to deliver real-time information to employees, so they can act on customer feedback and achieve results.

"

I found this at :

http://www.netpromoter.com/np/index.jsp

In essence, the NPS KPI is a metric by which to measure customer loyalty. In its simplicity, come the subjectiveness of how you treat your customers. So this begs the question: What can I do from an Enterprise Management perspective to affect this?

From my perspective, the NPS is a measure of the effectiveness of your support CULTURE first and foremost. This is a personal - core belief - sort of thing at its foundation. Customer facing people in your support organization must project several key personality traits and behaviors. Some of these I envision to be:

Dedication. The customer is the only person in the room sort of thing.

Urgency of need. The support person must understand the importance of the situation.

Empathy. A willingness and understanding of the customer's pain.

Confidence. In the face of unknown issues and varying conditions, the customer facing person must exhibit technical strength.

Follow Through. If the customer trusts you enough to let you off the phone to handle things, you MUST FOLLOW THROUGH.

There is also the notion that in a Service oriented company, EVERYONE is a sales person in one way or another. Every interaction means an opportunity to understand the customer and help them be successful.

When you go to MacDonalds and you're trying to figure out what you'd like or what level of poly unsaturated fat and cholesterol you want to propagate to your family... Ever gotten the person that asks you what you want and you don't know and they stand there looking at you? NPS score --.

Now, if they engage you and suggest items like a 12 pack of Big Macs, they are DEDICATED, empathic to your hunger pains,understand your urgency of need, and have confidence your order is going to be up in a minute or so after inputting it in the computer. And in the end they ask about dessert - Great Sales person and GREAT customer service person. NPS score ++.

From a personal work habits perspective, one of the key behaviors to be considered is creating and maintaining Situation Awareness. I ran across the term SA while working on an Air force project and found it profoundly appropo for operations organizations doing customer service. Check this out on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_awareness

I also read through several sections of the google book review about Situation Awareness by Dr. Mica Endsley and Daniel Garland. This is at :

http://books.google.com/books?id=tUwqcqa_QaMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Situation+Awareness&source=bl&ots=NccDiPzgMI&sig=NW0LAHrBsOTFXVmSyCSKz6154IU&hl=en&ei=pUWuS_HdE4X7lwf9tdCRAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

(I'm ordering the book!)

The model graphic they provide is useful as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SA_Wikipedia_Figure_1_Shared_SA_(20Nov2007).jpg

In effect, what enterprise management applications and technology MUST do to effectively achieve a higher NPS is to empower SA at all levels. In doing so, you create a culture where information is meant to be shared and used to make predictions and illicit responses and decisions based upon information being presented.

Now this is a bit taller of an order than once thought. For example, on the Event / Fault Management side of things, information is presented as events. People respond to events. They test or open tickets or whatever workflow they do when an event is received.

But an event is NOT a situation! A Situation is something a bit different and more abstract than a simple event. So, you have to transition your events to be situation focused! Interesting thought... Especially since event presentation is the real prevalent method! Maybe the Netcool approach needs to evolve a bit!

Interesting in that OpenNMS introduces the concept that events are different from Alarms in their own GUI. Check it out at:

http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Alarms

A brilliant piece of work (and a notion that simple is Good!) in that EVENTS != ALARMS! My hats off the the OpenNMS guys and the OGP for GETTING IT! In fact, its a start down the road of understanding the concept of Situations in SA.

Trouble Ticketing systems attempt to do this situation grouping via tickets but its almost too late once it leaves your near real time pane of glass. Once you transition away from a single pane of glass, you effectively lose your SA of the real time. And if you attempt to work out of tickets, you miss all of the elemental sorts of things that happen underneath. Even elements of information like event activity, performance thresholds, support activity, and the like have to be discerned and recognized in near real time to be effective information. If you miss it, you don't know. But your customer may not miss it!

If you ticket from event to ticket, you're asking for problems. Problems like tickets that are not problems but side effects. Or side effects that are problems, just rolled up under a ticket. Or awareness that conditions have cleared while the ticket is still being escalated and worked. Or missing all of the adjacent issues like a router taking out a subnet taking out and application and its three different desks.

The interesting part here is that two given situations may have events that effect each situation. This may throw a kink in normal, database table based event management systems. May be a bit difficult to implement and support.

I am beginning to think a bit different on Event processing especially with regards to SA and understanding, recognizing, and responding to SITUATIONS. For example, check out this presentation by Tim Bass of Cyberstrategics. He has a long history of thought leadership in Situational Awareness in Cyberspace.

http://www.slideshare.net/TimBassCEP/getting-started-in-cep-how-to-build-an-event-processing-application-presentation-717795

CEP techniques would enable an event to be consumed by multiple situations as situations develop and dissipate. Think about the weighting of events and conditions within a given situation. Some elements may be much more pertinent than others.

A significant part of Situation Awareness is the visualization and presentation of data regarding the ongoing situation. For example, check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdKOxZIIKmQ

From the aspect of true, situational awareness, shouldn't we be looking at evolving Enterprise Management toward being able to deal with situations?

Another thought here. If I'm worried about an NPS, could I MANAGE to it live? Or at least closer to real time? What if I could meld in the capabilities of Evolve24's The Mirror product as a look at the REPUTATION SITUATION as it evolves? Check it out at: http://www.evolve24.com/mirror_for_social_media.php

This kind of changes the face of what we have been considering as BSM, doesn't it.

The common denominator in all this process and technology is Knowledge Management. How are you developing knowledge? How are you integrating it in with EVERY person. How are you using it to create SA and HUGE business discriminators? How are you using KM to empower your customers?