SolarWinds IT Service Management (ITSM) is a software solution that helps organizations manage their IT services more effectively. It provides tools for logging and tracking service requests, resolving incidentsand problems, managing changes, and maintaining a knowledge base.
Organizations can streamline their IT service delivery processes, improve efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction. Offering intuitive features for logging and tracking service requests, SolarWinds ITSM ensures a structured approach to managing incoming tickets. This helps organizations prioritize and address service requests promptly, leading to improved response times and customer satisfaction.
About Solarwinds
ITSM Product
SolarWinds ITSM is revolutionizing incident management with its GenAI summary feature, leveraging advanced AI capabilities to provide concise and insightful incident summaries.
Let's explore how this feature is transforming IT operations:
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Smooth Handovers:
In the fast-paced world of IT, smooth handovers are essential for efficient incident resolution. With SolarWinds ITSM's GenAI summary feature, when tickets transition between teams or individuals, the next assignee receives a clear and comprehensive summary of the incident's context. This accelerates the resolution process by ensuring seamless knowledge transfer.
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Tackling Lengthy Tickets:
Lengthy tickets or those containing extensive information can pose challenges for IT leads and managers. However, with the GenAI summary feature, key insights are distilled from ongoing conversations within the incident. This enables IT personnel to swiftly grasp the situation, even with complex or prolonged tickets, facilitating quicker resolutions.
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Dealing with Urgent Issues:
In critical or escalated situations, time is of the essence. The GenAI summary feature provides stakeholders with quick overviews of incident statuses and highlights essential details for prioritization and decision-making. This ensures that urgent issues receive immediate attention, minimizing downtime and mitigating potential risks.
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Easy Sharing and Data Privacy:
Sharing incident summaries is simplified with SolarWinds ITSM's GenAI summary feature. Moreover, data security and privacy remain paramount. The system operates within Amazon Bedrock infrastructure, ensuring that each customer's information is secure and isolated. Summaries are tailored for individual customers, safeguarding sensitive data and maintaining confidentiality.
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Tailored Learning for Enhanced Relevance:
One of the key strengths of the GenAI summary feature is its ability to learn and adapt to each customer's unique needs. Recognizing that not every use-case is relevant to the next customer, the AI customizes its learning process. This ensures that the generated summaries remain highly relevant and insightful, contributing to improved incident management and customer satisfaction.
By harnessing the power of AI within SolarWinds ITSM, the GenAI summary feature optimizes incident management processes, enhances collaboration, and improves overall operational efficiency. With its focus on data privacy, security, and tailored learning, it sets a new standard for incident management solutions in the digital age.
About GenAI
Summary
The GenAI Incident Summarisation feature was important for our agent users. As LLM technology became more accessible, we continued with this feature request because it could effectively support our agents in the following scenarios:
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Difficulty in Understanding and Summarizing Ticket Details:
Agents spend a significant amount of time understanding all the comments, title, and description of a ticket, as well as manually summarizing this information, which prolongs the ticket resolution process.
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Inefficient Handover Process
The lack of clear and consistent summaries during ticket handovers between teams or individuals leads to slower resolutions and increased chances of misunderstandings or missed details.
These were the primary issues that we aimed to address with the GenAI Summary feature.
Problems
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Agents
An agent who manages a high volume of technical incidents on a daily basis often faces challenges in summarizing and documenting the intricate details of each ticket. Balancing the need for swift issue resolution with the requirement for detailed record-keeping and seamless handovers can be demanding. The GenAI feature addresses these challenges by automatically creating concise and clear summaries of the Incident details, which streamlines the documentation process. Additionally, it enhances the handover process between team members, ensuring that critical information is efficiently communicated and reducing the potential for errors or misunderstandings.
User Persona
I used the "How Might We" questioning method in the context of a user impersonation, this allowed me for the generation of inventive solutions while ensuring a focus on addressing the most crucial problems. By framing questions using "How Might We", it encourages creative thinking and opens up possibilities for innovative approaches to designing and improving the user impersonation feature. When applied to a user impersonation, "How Might We" questioning prompts us to consider various aspects of its functionality, user experience, and problem-solving capabilities. For example, "How might we help I and managers quickly assess long-term incidents without having to read through extensive incident histories?".
How Might We
Method
To better understand the GenAI Incident Summarisation feature and its challenges, I mapped out all competitors with AI Summary for Incidents, learning from their successes and mistakes.
Competitors
Thorough the research I collected and explored inspirations and ideas from direct competitors, the broader ecosystem, prevailing design trends, and big apps in the market, all tailored towards enhancing the GenAI Incident Summarisation feature. I meticulously mapped out all the corresponding flows and research using Figjam. Below, you can find screenshots from the research.
UI.UX Research
I used the method "User Journey Map" method to proactively address potential issues, enhance customer retention, and uncover vital information for making informed decisions. These visual diagrams depict various scenarios of the expected user experience when users interact with the GenAI Incident Summarisation feature.
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Impersonate Action
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Impersonation in audit
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Impersonation settings
User Journey Map -
Scenarios
A comprehensive map of the user experience when engaging with the user impersonation feature, demonstrating each UI screen and scenario.
A key tool for aligning development and project management teams prior
to creating wireframes and visual designs of the user impersonation feature.
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Option 1 - Admin Impersonates another user
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Admin Impersonation in the Audit
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Impersonation settings
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Option 2 - Admin Impersonates another user
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Edge Cases
Flow of the Screens
by Notes
We Have Chosen to Proceed with Option 1
What were the reasons for choosing the first option?
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It is easy to learn how to impersonate a user by using the industry standard method, which is considered to be the good solution.
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It makes sense for the user experience that if you want to switch views and impersonate another user, you should do so by selecting it on your profile.
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By using a "Are you sure?" pop-up prompt before entering, we can maintain a high level of privacy while still allowing the user to take the risk. However, it's important for the user to understand the potential risks involved.
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For the better user experience, it is much easier to go back to the header
menu and impersonate a user again.
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We conducted testing of the two flow options with key customers and found that the first flow allowed our customers to impersonate user more quickly, They also expressed that option 1 provided a better user experience.
Handoff
In the handoff phase, I met with the development team, explained the design details thoroughly, and ensured a comprehensive understanding of the project requirements. This streamlined the transfer of responsibilities and minimized the chances of overlooking important elements during development.
Design Review
The purpose of the design review to verify that the final product aligns with the designated design specifications and to offer constructive feedback on the user interface (UI) design, if required. This process aims to guarantee that the end result faithfully represents the intended design while also allowing for necessary improvements and refinements to the UI, ensuring a user-friendly experience.
Handoff Phase and Design Review
Please find below the UI screens from our web app, illustrating the user impersonation feature.
These screens offer a visual representation and flows of the user impersonation feature in the web app.
