Blog - IT CSI

Into the Incident Experienced

In an incident situation,we are always looking for that “Silver Bullet” question – the one question that would bring some insight to the incident being experienced. The good news is that there is such a question; in fact there are a few of these questions that could provide you with that insight needed. We call that the “but not” question.

Simple Question, But Powerful!

One of the most important questions to ask yourself in attempting to solve an incident quickly, accurately and permanently is to ask the following three questions:

1. What do you know about the incident?
2. What don’t you know about the incident?
3. How can you collaborate with whom that could provide you with this missing information?

Over the years as a consultant, I’ve learned how to listen to what people are saying, albeit doing it for a different reason you might have had in mind. I am doing it to eliminate the “noise” and “clutter” normally surrounding problem solving sessions. This might surprise you, but the biggest obstacle in solving problems and incidents effectively, is the human nature to “elevate” or escalate things in order to get the appropriate attention of the other person.

Many IT Professionals look at the same set of data and come to the conclusion that the raw data as it is represented at the time does not add any clue for a conclusion. That might be true, but if you know what to do, that same set of data could be transformed successfully into highly useful insights into a problem situation. The secret is to use a process that would allow the investigator to transform the data into useful information. How do we do that? Like I said, using a specific process such as the following:

Over the years as a consultant, I’ve learned how to listen to what people are saying, albeit doing it for a different reason you might have had in mind. I am doing it to eliminate the “noise” and “clutter” normally surrounding problem solving and root cause analysis sessions. This might surprise you, but the biggest obstacle in solving problems and incidents effectively, is the human nature to “elevate” or escalate things in order to get the appropriate attention of the right person.

"Hearing the words "outage" or "crash" in an I.T. environment is not something you would like to hear on your watch..."