Trustworthy Operations Management Solutions

I asked Stan to contribute a blog on a topic that he and I are asked, that of "trust worth systems/ data" this is an incredible critical item as we move to "actionable decisions"

Blog by Stan DeVries.

When younger workers are asked about how “trustworthy” solutions should perform, a common response is “it just works”.  This is a reasonable but demanding expectation, and it is a combination of availability, accuracy and acceptable user experience in all facets.  One aspect of operations management solutions which makes this expectation more challenging is that these solutions are inherently more complex – they include at least 2 software applications, sometimes 15 or more.  And complexity tends to reduce availability.

Several customers have asked how to practically achieve and sustain “trustworthy” operations management solutions.  An appropriate analogy is a fuel gauge in a car; if it is functioning less than 100% of the time, users won’t trust it at all.  The following are best practices:

• Design the solution to automatically handle many failure modes, including user error.  Most of the design of automatic teller machines (ATM’s) is handling failure modes.  Methods include automated workflow for missing or grossly erroneous data, software and machine health, network outages etc.

• Design the solution for some redundancy, including “store and forward” of data to withstand network outages and other failures.  Note that this technique is only usable when the software applications can rapidly process the restored data while processing “new” data.

•  Design the calculations for sufficient accuracy and availability.  Simple mathematics is much more available, but much less accurate, than complex mathematics.  Technology is available that delivers high accuracy and has built-in logic and knowledge to overcome many failure modes including “solver” errors, sensitivity to missing or inaccurate input data etc.

• Design the solution’s outputs using the “4 rights” instead of the “4 anys”:

1.  Information should be delivered at the “right” time (which might be earlier than “real time”) depending upon the operations management conditions.
2.   Information should be delivered to the “right” persons.  Operations management solutions tend to broadcast information including undesired performance and tend to broadcast information which is irrelevant to most users, which means that users must filter out information that seems like “spam” and users must learn to trust the solution.
3.    Information should be delivered in the “right” context.  There is an analogy which characterizes “data”, “information”, “knowledge” and “wisdom”, where “data” is raw data, “information” is trustworthy data (may include substitutions and reconciliation), “knowledge” presents a comparison of information to targets, constraints and similar information, and “wisdom” is prescriptive instructions to exploit desired opportunities and to prevent or minimize undesired conditions.

An operation management solution evolves technology is introduced, the operation evolves and as users increase their dependency and trust in the solution; the above methods are good fundamentals for the solution’s lifecycle.