Applying Decision Making Digital Twins in Incident Management

Applying Decision Making Digital Twins within Incident Management

In our previous blog we compared Decisioning Digital Twins (DDT) to a smart, virtual colleague, explaining how the cloud-based AI solution can help you, amongst other things, resolve incidents more quickly. In this blog we look at how DDTs come into play in two common and critical incident types.

 Can’t access cash and cannot pay for the goods

Our first case involves a bank. Its ATMs suddenly stop dispensing cash, while chip and pin terminals have frozen too and aren’t taking payments. Clearly as issues go, they don’t get much more pressing. And immediately the bank declares a major incident.

Within minutes the incident response team jumps on a conference bridge, sharing what insight they have. Unfortunately, the intelligence is somewhat thin on the ground. Indeed, it’s not clear where the problem lies, who’s needed to sort it out and how long it might take. If you’ve been there, and all of us in Tech Ops have, it’s an uncomfortable moment.

But what if, when the issue happens, the bank’s best technical minds are on hand immediately to start investigating. Within seconds, they’re able to say which area may be at fault, what expertise is needed and how long it may take before things are purring along again.

Sounds far-fetched? Well, the utopia is real… and it’s what happens when a DDT is in play.

Our DDT solution, from Merlyn, includes a Tacit Object Modeller (TOM). To build the capabilities of your Incident TOM, your premier database, storage, network, application, and other engineers use a simple interface to provide their thoughts and responses in relation to tackling incidents, The result of this work is the Major Incident DDT, which your engineers can then train and test to see how it responds to incidents. With testing complete and depending on how you integrate your DDT you can also define your risk parameters, with the option to allow the DDT to make changes autonomously, while others, which may have knock-on effects, can be sent to human colleagues to take a view.

 The volume challenge

Of course, outside of major, high-profile incidents, a whole range of minor issues flare up each day. These are picked up by monitoring and systems management tools. And based on their experience, instincts and potentially capacity constraints, ops teams often make a call to ignore most of them and focus instead on the ones they believe to be the most important.

While this is understandable, and pragmatic, small problems have a nasty habit of evolving into critical ones – ultimately snowballing into a business-critical problem.

With DDTs in play, you can eradicate these lurking ‘monsters’ as the DDT will review every minor incident and either make decisions which nip things in the bud or will raise an alert for your team to check. It’s almost like an insurance policy. But one that pays out by preventing issues, rather than recompensing after the fact.

For more on our DDT services can help you do more with less, avoid business critical issues and take pressure from your teams speak to us today or contact us below.