Situational Awareness in IT

What’s Going On? (No, What’s Really Going On?)

I have what I like to call a “situational awareness thing.”

It’s this strong feeling that I really (really) want to know “what exactly is going on.” It’s not uncommon (and actually pretty important!) among us who work in medicine or IT, but for me, it carries over into other parts of my life, too.

Like flying.

Last week, I was flying home from Chicago (after a great panel at Becker's Healthcare with Audrius Polikaitis of the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System, and Michael Pfeffer of Stanford Health Care – thanks, guys!). Part of my flying routine – driven by my desire for situational awareness – is to understand what’s about to happen with my flight. That includes checking conditions at my destination.

And when I looked last week as we were about to take off, it wasn’t pretty:

It looked like there was a pretty big backup. But with the weather being fine… what was the problem? I kept digging. I decided to go over to https://www.liveatc.net/ to eavesdrop on the tower frequency. Turns out there was “VIP movement,” which is typically a dignitary of some kind, passing through, which stops traffic.?

As I listened, seatbelt still fastened for takeoff, I heard an active conversation between the crews on the aircraft, on the ground waiting to take off, and the tower. The tower controller outlined what he knew, how long it would probably be, and the order of flights to depart. He was sharing his situational awareness with a dozen other professionals, each of whom had over a hundred passengers on their airplane, all wondering what was going on and looking for an update. Further complicating the situation was the need to get all these inbound aircraft on the ground, and it sounded like there was a decent plan for that, too.

It sounded pretty straightforward to hear it, and I got the sense that as bad as it looked, we wouldn’t be delayed getting home.

What does all this have to do with information technology? Surprisingly, a lot. ?

One of the most difficult challenges during an outage is managing the flow of information, especially during a major outage. Even getting a sense of how bad an outage actually is can be harder than it seems – it requires asking lots of people from different perspectives, “What are you seeing and hearing?”?

Then there’s the internal “backstage” side of the problem. Typically, there are two or more simultaneous calls, one being an open technical bridge line dedicated to those working the issue. For those pros to stop and update IT leaders, who in turn are under pressure to update the organization, it means stopping the work of fixing the problem—even for a few minutes—when time is not on your side.?

One of the ways I try to approach that problem is not too far off from the method I used on that plane last week – listening.

Just by listening to the technical conversation, I can get a pretty solid sense of what the technical team is proposing, the likely timeline of the fix and any uncertainties they’ve identified. I then clarify my sense of situational awareness with my colleagues to confirm my impression and use that to update the rest of the organization, kind of like the tower on an airfield.

?Of course, all that is easier said than done. In a bad downtime, everyone is looking for information, and they want it now! Our team usually does a great job working the issue – the hardest part is figuring out how to get the story so the rest of the organization can plan around the fix.

(And yes, I did arrive home on time!)