WHITE PAPER
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Is your Incident Resolution process slow
and laborious due to inefficient collaboration within and across your teams, or lack of expert knowledge?
- Solve problems faster
- Track resolution progress easily
- Collaborate efficiently
- Reuse knowledge effectively
- Increase productivity
Visualize potential causes for a problem, add relevant details in the context of a cause, and have everyone on the same page quickly. Eliminate reading of long and convoluted text in incident tickets, greatly speeding up communication.
Our collaborative Investigation Maps™ can reduce your MTTR by half or more!
ML-Powered Collaborative Investigation Maps for
Accelerated Incident Resolution
Our Innovative Technology Helps Teams Solve Problems Faster
Incident Resolution is very often slow and laborious due to inefficient collaboration within and across teams, inadequate knowledge reuse, delays due to ad-hoc and unclear strategies, and shortage of subject matter experts. The team collaboration problem has worsened at these challenging times when people are working remotely due to the virus crisis.
Our Solution
Visualize problems as Investigation Maps™ to enable faster collaboration – see potential causes for a problem in a structured way, with in-context details per cause and automatic merging of concurrent user updates. Also augment human intelligence via Machine Learning on prior problems - see cause & action recommendations for faster resolution of new problems.
Efficient and effective collaboration is of utmost importance for remote teamwork. Our solution brings significant benefits to distributed teams in charge of supporting business-critical systems.
Business Benefits
Solve problems faster
Operational or technical problems can cause revenue loss & reputational damage. smartQED lowers MTTR (mean time to resolve) by up to 50%, improving reliability.
Track resolution progress easily
Provide your customers, managers and key stakeholders with clear visibility into your investigation progress through automatic real-time reporting.
Boost shared understanding through our visual tools. Reduce the burden of out-of-context communication like email updates and manual reports. Have everyone on the same page quickly and remove duplication or delay of work from uncoordinated actions.
Reuse knowledge effectively
Eliminate endless tedious “search and read”
Product & Architecture Summary
QED Space
Investigators & managers come together virtually to solve problems and collaborate efficiently using this visual workspace with Investigation Maps™.
QED Case Base
Structured knowledge repository for resolved problems with their symptoms, context, causes & solutions.
QED Insights
Integrated Recommendation Engine that learns from solved problems and gives precise cause & solution suggestions to expedite the resolution of new problems.
Summary or detailed information about investigation progress for better inter- and intra-team communication on incidents.
Managers’ Dashboard
Displays aggregated data and KPI trends to
Architecture
This visual workspace is where investigators and supervisors collaborate virtually to solve incidents and problems using our Investigation Maps.
External data such as alerts & log errors can be pulled in through our REST APIs to associate as evidence in the cause analysis.
This is the structured knowledge repository of problems along with their symptoms, context, causes & solutions. The QED Case Base supports continuous learning as knowledge is automatically captured from Investigation Maps while users solve problems within QED Space.
Automated Reporting & Dashboard
This is an integrated ML-based recommendation engine that analyzes solved problems in our QED Case Base to generate likely cause & solution suggestions for new problems, based on their observed symptoms. These suggestions are computed from historical problem data with similarity matching and analytics by our powerful & proprietary AI/ML algorithms.
Unplanned Outages
Collaborating under high pressure with large teams is greatly facilitated by QED Space, with visual Investigation Maps to clearly track the problem-solving approach, status and actions.
Junior Staff
Suggestions provided for new problems by our QED Insights Recommendation Engine upskill junior staff who can easily reuse knowledge without tedious searching and exhaustive reading of prior incidents and knowledge bases.
Root Cause Analysis
Our Investigation Maps eliminate or greatly reduce confusion, duplicated work, and uncoordinated actions through clarity of approach and easy visual status tracking. Automated Reporting facilitates both internal as well as external communication regarding the incident.
Operations & support teams frequently face strong pressure to resolve incidents faster due to stringent SLA agreements & risk of goodwill loss with customers, especially for business-critical situations and systems that have high availability requirements.
For urgent incidents, “war rooms” often need to be started for firefighting. Multiple SMEs come together to investigate and solve such problems. The size of such teams may range from a few people to a few hundred.
Collaborating under high pressure with large and/or remote teams is greatly facilitated by our collaborative QED Space, with visual Investigation Maps enabling clear tracking of the plans and progress, and putting everyone on the same page quickly.
Junior Staff
Skilled staff may often leave the team for newer projects and senior staff may retire. Difficulties and delays in resolving issues often happen when less experienced/junior staff need to handle emergency incidents and unplanned outages.
QED Insights Recommendation Engine greatly helps to reduce delays in such scenarios. Junior staff are upskilled and can easily leverage accumulated problem-solving knowledge without manual searching and repeated reading of prior incidents and knowledge articles.
Root Cause Analysis of Complex or Cross-Functional Problems
Investigating faults or incidents that are complex and/or cross-functional often require root cause analysis by different teams, sometimes working remotely in different time zones. Serious glitches are likely in such scenarios. Task handover and shift changes can result in duplicated work. Uncoordinated actions may cause delays due to lack of clarity regarding the investigation plans and progress. Periodically, customers and stakeholders need to be informed of the current status and next steps - this reporting task can become repetitive and tedious when done manually.
Collaborative Investigation Maps
Collaborative Investigation Maps are highly effective for joint problem solving by teams and also for automated learning from prior problems – it is one of our key innovations!
The maps are concurrently updatable by many users, with merging and notification of updates to others, putting everyone on the same page. Audit logs track all updates and can be added to your incident tickets.
Investigation Templates
ML-powered Investigation Maps™ enable efficient and effective problem solving by teams, significantly reducing the MTTR and increasing productivity.
Our Approach to Accelerate Resolutions
Our mission at smartQED is to eliminate the delays in incident resolution.
We do that in 2 major ways:
Through our Visual Investigation Maps™ that enable efficient team collaboration with easy tracking & reporting of plans and progress.
By augmenting human problem-solving intelligence with our powerful Machine Learning algorithms that generate useful recommendations from historical data of solved problems.
Investigation Maps™ are a key innovation in smartQED. You can use these visual maps to depict a hierarchy of potential causes for a problem clearly in the form of a Cause Tree or a Fishbone / Ishikawa diagram, an established and popular method of root cause analysis (RCA) in various industries. You can also associate specific details to a cause such as symptoms (evidence), fault status, notes, attachments, actions and more, for effective in-context collaboration which greatly reduces confusion and effectively enhances shared understanding.
These maps are concurrently updatable by multiple users, with automatic merging & notifications to others, helping to put everyone on the same page quickly. Updates are tracked in our audit logs, and they could be inserted into your incident tickets for time-based recording of the updates.
You can also use our QuickStart templates to jumpstart future problems. Templates enable convenient re-use of knowledge from earlier issues and from the problem-solving knowledge of your skilled domain experts.
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Investigation Maps
Augmented Intelligence
Errors and anomalies input to QED Insights will find and rank similar problems without manual searching. We further analyze the Investigation Maps of matching problems/work to generate suggestions for likely cause and actions, jumpstarting the resolution process.
About smartQED
smartQED, a startup founded by Silicon Valley veterans, provides an ML-powered visual workspace for efficient and effective problem investigations. Investigation Maps™, our patent-pending innovation, learns from historical data to provide likely cause and solution recommendations for new problems, significantly reducing resolution times and increasing team productivity.
Augmented Intelligence through ML-powered Recommendations
When a new problem is detected by your monitoring or alerting systems, the errors observed in different components can be input to QED Insights, which uses our well-integrated and ML-powered Recommendation Engine to automatically find and rank similar problems that were resolved earlier, eliminating manual searches.
We further analyze the matching problems to aggregate the results and prescribe likely causes and known solutions for the problem. These precise suggestions provide valuable starting points for your new investigations, helping to keep them focused on causes and solutions that are relevant for your system based on its history.
Recommendations greatly reduce the time taken to resolve your new issues, and also minimize the number of experts who need to be involved.
Integrations are supported through our REST APIs with various ecosystem tools such as log collectors, monitoring & alerting systems, service ticket / work management products, and chat, email & other collaboration tools. smartQED fits in smoothly into your existing eco-system, working well with tools like JIRA and Slack to accelerate your incident resolutions.