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:
Handling sensitive ticket data can raise privacy concerns, especially with LLMs. It’s important to make sure account details and personal information are anonymized, securely handled within each account, and follow SolarWinds security rules to keep user trust and meet privacy laws. The GenAI summary feature makes sharing incident summaries easier while keeping data security a top priority. It runs on Amazon Bedrock, which keeps each customer's information safe and separate. Summaries are created specifically for each customer, protecting sensitive data and ensuring no information is shared across accounts.
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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
Agents face significant challenges in managing and resolving incidents effectively, impacting overall productivity and ticket resolution times:
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Difficulty in Understanding and Summarizing Ticket Details:
Agents spend excessive time reviewing ticket comments, titles, and descriptions to understand the full context. This manual effort to summarize information not only delays resolution but also increases the workload for agents.
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Inefficient Handover Process
When incidents are handed over between teams or individuals, the lack of clear and consistent summaries leads to misunderstandings, missed details, and slower resolutions, further complicating the workflow.
These were the primary issues that we aimed to address with the GenAI Summary feature.
Problems
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Admins
An admin manages system configurations to enhance agent productivity. By enabling features like GenAI summarization, they help agents quickly generate concise incident summaries, improving workflow efficiency and reducing errors.
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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 summary feature.
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AI Incident Summary Generation and Rating
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AI Incident Summary Regeneration
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Edit AI Incident Summary
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Delete AI Incident Summary
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GenAI Summarization Settings
User Journey Map -
Scenarios
A comprehensive flow map of the user experience when interacting with the GenAI incident summary feature, highlighting each UI screen and scenario. This serves as a crucial tool for aligning development and project management teams before proceeding with wireframes and visual designs for the GenAI incident summary feature.
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Option 1 - AI Incident Summary Generation and Rating
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Option 2 - AI Incident Summary Generation and Rating
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AI Incident Summary Regeneration
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Edit AI Incident Summary
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Delete AI Incident Summary
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GenAI Summarization Settings
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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Easier to Find, placing the GenAI Incident Summary below the description aligns with users' mental models. Agents often expect summary-related actions to be closely linked to the incident details they just read, making it easier for them to understand and manage the summary in context.
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Less Distractions, with the summary in the main section, agents don't have to look around the page, reducing distractions and making the process faster.
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The step-by-step flow of reading the incident, generating the summary, and saving it all in one place feels more natural and helps agents work more efficiently.
Overall, considering the points mentioned, we found that Option 1 offers a simpler and more efficient user experience for agents.
Find below the wireframes, illustrating the AI Incident Summary feature. These wireframes provide a high-level representation of the layout and flow of the AI Incident Summary feature within the web app.
