Decision management series – Part 2

A clear understanding means better decisions  

In the first installment of our series, we talked about how Mission Control boosts an organizations decision and incident management capabilities by supporting good-decision making in the field. But how does it do that? One of the methods is by increasing your operator's situational intelligence. After all, having a clear understanding of a situation dramatically increases anyone's ability to quickly make smart decisions in response to an incident.

When it comes to situational intelligence, the first step is to understand exactly what it is that you're dealing with. When an alarm goes off, it's good for your operators to know if it's an incident or an error before springing into action. Mission Control automatically assesses incoming events and sensor data and qualifies them within pre-established incident categories that are designed for a specific environment.

Once the correct incident category has been established, Mission Control triggers the correct incident, which then launches workflows that drive system behavior and guide operator responses through the entire lifecycle of that incident using standard operating procedures (SOPs).

The increased situational intelligence also relates to what operators can see and do.  Mission Control goes beyond traditional maps, which are generally limited to monitoring security entities and singular events, by introducing new levels of interaction within maps. This includes the ability to manage both active and historical incidents and to monitor live events and incidents. Mission Control also allows you to run reports for analysis purposes and continuous improvement as well as for auditing purposes for increased situational intelligence over the long term.

Up next in our series, we're going to look at how Visualization in Mission Control can simplify responses to events and incidents.