Should RIM Develop A System Status Page?
View Poll Results: Should RIM Immediately Develop a Real-Time System Status Page?
- Voters
- 16. You may not vote on this poll
-
Yes -=- RIM should develop a real-time status page immediately.
-
No -=- I would rather contact my carrier or complain on CrackBerry
-
What's a system?
- Hello.
I've posted in other threads on this topic, but wanted to start one central place for CB members to add their input regarding RIM's failure to provide real-time status of their disparate systems.
I posted on this issue this morning on blackberry.com, in their forums, as well, and thought I'd carry the conversation over here too. Here's what I posted on blackberry.com:
Good day. I am a long-time BlackBerry user, but new to posting in these forums, though I monitor them frequently and have found them terrifically helpful.
This post has been developing in my head since the September 22, 2009 BIS outage, reinforced in November 2009 during/after that outage, and solidified as a result of the December 27, 2009 BIS-E outage. The purpose of this post is to generate and attempt to develop consensus in the community on the subject of the lack of transparency currently exhibited by RIM when outages are in process.
As one who consults on information technology issues, I well understand the complexities that can develop during emergency/outage conditions. The focus is, and should remain, on eliminating all distractions from the technical group working the emergency/outage situation, in order that they are in a position to focus the entirety of their efforts, skills, knowledge and time on crisis mitigation and service restoration.
That said, however, there is, in my opinion, no excuse for RIM's opacity regarding service disruptions. In fact RIM's pattern since at least 2005 has been to issue, at most, a single, brief statement some time after the disruption is identified, followed by a single, later, again brief statement upon system restoration - which doesn't always equal service restoration to end users.
This lack of a free flow of information from RIM to the carriers and/or from RIM directly to end users serves to increase costs for the carriers (arising from the marked increase in call volume to their cserv call centers from affected customers); increase costs and decrease efficiency for end users, whose only current reliable resources regarding RIM service disruptions are their carriers; and generally increase frustration as a result of the lack of available information regarding service disruptions.
That brings me to my concept:
1. That RIM create, for example, http://status.blackberry.com as a sub-domain to *.blackberry.com.
2. status.* would serve as a marketplace of reliable, real-time information regarding BIS-E, -B, and BES service either by region, by carrier, or by some other discrete measure.
3. The format and layout for the proposed status.* sub-domain could, for example, take its cues from OpenDNS' status page OpenDNS -=- Status Page and from Google, Inc.'s status page Google Apps -=- Status Page.
4. Both of the aforementioned status pages are concise and clear, which I believe to be a critical part of RIM's status page. Since the vast majority of service disruptions affect BIS, not BES customers (BIS customers naturally more likely to be "consumer-level" users, as opposed to BES "corp-level" users), BIS customers generally not having an IT department on whom to call during service disruptions, the unintended side effect of unscheduled disruptions is that these consumers bury carriers with tech support calls. This carrier overload, and the ensuring ancillary and direct costs, could be largely mitigated through the development of status.*.
5. In order for status.* to be truly effective, however, RIM will need to be willing to create real-time integration between the customer-facing status.* sub-domain and their internal systems worldwide. While such an integration can pose technical challenges, it can and is already effectively implemented, as evidenced by the two (2) sites referenced in #3 above, and in many others.
We all recognize, or should recognize, that service disruptions are a part of life in our tech-driven society. Armed with this knowledge, it is incumbent upon a provider to study how to best process disruptions. These studies include but are not limited to: identification of points of vulnerability in all systems, identification of existing single points of failure, identification of potential cascade effects resulting from a single failure across other systems or through the affected system, mitigation opportunities arising from the foregoing, identification of key technical personnel in each system sector who constitute a rapid response team in the event of a disruption, and the determination of how to communicate the status of disruptions to consumers. It is, of course, this last aspect that is the focal point of this post. I do not intend to address the question of risk analysis/mitigation practices in this post.
To summarize (briefly I hope, as this post is longer than I had intended); the irony in timing of the EMEA BIS-E outage on 12/17/2009 coincidental with RIM's 3Q2009 financial report only serves to enhance my argument for a real-time status.* sub-domain. RIM announced the sale of 10.1 million device in 3Q2009. Subscriber growth continues at a steady pace, and RIM remains the #2 performer worldwide in the realm of smartphones. It is for these very reasons that a status.* sub-domain is so desperately needed, and will so significantly enhance RIM's image worldwide with BIS-only users who have been continually frustrated and angered by the lack of available information from the source (RIM). Further, for us techies, PMs following disruptions, identifying root causes, steps taken to resolve, success/failure of steps taken to resolve, action plan to mitigate the possibility of the same failure reoccurring and total length of disruption, among other information, could easily be posted in their own discrete section/page on status.*.
I appreciate your reading my concept, in spite of its length. I intend to send a letter to RIM laying out essentially what I've posted here. However, we all know that there is power in numbers. Hence my posting. My hope is that someone(s) from RIM are monitoring this forum and might, perhaps, take away something from my concept.
Best Regards,
Jason
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your input.
NOTE: MODS -=- If you need to move this to another location, please feel free to. Thanks.12-18-09 11:36 AMLike 0 - I like it. As an addition to your reasoning on increased costs, don't forget that many users, myself included, periodically sent Test messages to myself to see how long the delay was/is. If they had a way for us to check status and for it to be updated frequently enough, they could reduce the overhead to all of the carriers, and their servers, by us not needing to send test message since we could get good info on current status.12-18-09 11:41 AMLike 0
- I like it. As an addition to your reasoning on increased costs, don't forget that many users, myself included, periodically sent Test messages to myself to see how long the delay was/is. If they had a way for us to check status and for it to be updated frequently enough, they could reduce the overhead to all of the carriers, and their servers, by us not needing to send test message since we could get good info on current status.12-18-09 12:49 PMLike 0
- You have my vote!!!
Along with this, we'd also like "DETAILED" info on what's going on with these outages and whatnot. For the most part each and every RIM outage in history has gone about with NO EXPLANATION TO THE PUBLIC CONSUMER. That to me means only one thing... RIM thinks it's too big to be held accountable that they don't see it necessary to let us know what went wrong. That's bad in my book as it leaves us to think the worse. Who's to say it was something as simple as a cut fiber cable or something as drastic as a network intrusion that caused issues for them? If RIM is trying to mask embarassment by hiding the true natures of these failures, I think they're trying to mask the truth and trust that we hold them to. It's certainly a scarry thought to think the worse when the outages happen.12-18-09 04:17 PMLike 0
- Forum
- Popular at CrackBerry
- General BlackBerry News, Discussion & Rumors
Should RIM Develop A System Status Page?
LINK TO POST COPIED TO CLIPBOARD