Concepts

In short we are exploring the two concepts:

• Status: "is the service working now?", "why isn’t the service working now?", "when will the service be working again?"
• Risk: "whats the risk of me not being able to complete so-and-so task on my computer today/this afternoon/tomorrow?"

We are trying to display information on these two different concepts with one intuitive page that is limited in size. Our ideal is to produce a page that requires not much more than a glance to work out whether further reading is needed.  In addition, this information can also be accessed using the "current issues" and "scheduled work" feeds.

Because of space limitations the notes column now refers to the latest risk/status element that is being made public. Once you click on the link you get both status and risk info in the same place - so it is easy to get the whole picture.

After a service has experienced problems or been at risk, our practice is often to indicate a "consequential risk".  This is because from observation there is a greater than normal risk that a recently restored service will fail or degrade in some way.   In short it means the service has recently been fixed.

We have been through a number of iterations since Autumn 2005 when we first launched the insrvStatus facility.  We would however welcome comments and any suggestions of improvements you might be able to make.

Dr Chris Graves
Principal Consultant
Communications Enablement
Information Services