How Many Is Too Much? Exploring Costs of Coordination During Outages

Service outages can attract a lot of attention from a wide range of participants - particularly when the service is for a business critical function. These ‘stakeholders’ represent multiple roles with different experience, responsibilities, expertise and knowledge about how the system functions - be they users, management, engineers from other dependent services or the incident responders paged in to help with the response. Each stakeholder brings important contributions that are necessary for maintaining reliable operations but smoothly and effectively integrating their contributions or sufficiently meeting their needs for updates, for task delegation or for decisions requires elaborate coordination often under extreme time pressure.  Prior research has shown these coordinative efforts represent a significant cognitive cost (Klein et al, 2005; Klinger & Klein, 1999; Klein, 2006) and require a distinct set of skills (Woods, 2017) to manage in concert with the demands of diagnosing and resolving the incident itself.

Presenting findings from her doctoral research and her experience working with site reliability engineers responsible for critical digital infrastructure (CDI), Laura will uncover the hidden costs of coordination, highlight how the challenges of modern IT infrastructure will continue to impede hitting four 9’s service reliability and show how resilient performance is directly tied to coordination. Along the way, she will examine problematic elements of an Incident Command System, use case study examples to describe helpful and harmful patterns of coordination and offer some promising directions for how to control the costs of coordination in your incident response practices. You will never look at incident response the same way!