This week, Jeli announced a new socio-technical learning center.  To find out more, VMblog spoke with Nora Jones, CEO and Founder of Jeli.io.

VMblog:  Jeli announced a socio-technical learning center.  Can you first define for readers what "socio-technical" means and why it's an important concept?

Nora Jones:  Great question. It's certainly not a word you hear everyday but one that all of us in technology should be thinking about. Socio-technical refers to the interrelationship between people and technology within a system- so, this can include an organization, software, or even the complex infrastructure of a society. Technology continues to evolve and advance rapidly, but it is critical to also understand how humans interact with the technology. A large organization may be running a complex hybrid infrastructure across multiple continents to support their business- and there are also humans building, supporting, and maintaining this infrastructure.

So then, what does this mean at Jeli? We go beyond the traditional focus of just the technical parts of a system to a more holistic approach that considers the social (e.g. people, teams, tenure, workload) and the technical systems and how these interact in order to build more resilient organizations. Behind all of this, the Jeli approach recognizes that no matter how sophisticated or automated our technology gets, people are the most adaptable part of the system and the reason for continued success.

VMblog:  What insights are the Jeli Socio-Technical Learning Center trying to surface for organizations?

Jones:  Learning Center helps organizations understand trends to better support their uptime-critical employees, see where to focus attention within current system stresses, and proactively address issues before things go wrong. We provide answers to questions like:

• Which on-call engineers are overburdened and at risk of burnout? What services are at risk because of this?
• Which areas have had increased turnover, leaving critical systems unsupported?
• Where are knowledge silos and single points of failure for support?
• Which services don't have on-call support?
• Who is frequently called into incidents while not on-call?
• If an engineer leaves the organization, which services were they supporting and how may this impact staffing decisions?

We encourage our customers to get started by building an incident analysis practice to help answer these questions and are excited to now automatically provide this insight out of the box with the new Learning Center.

 

VMblog:  How does the data required for better insights get pushed to the Jeli platform?  Is this a manual process or does the Jeli platform somehow ingest this data automatically?

Jones:  We make it easy! We know it's important to make these imports as frictionless as possible in order to help ensure folks have the full view of incidents through data. Customers using Jeli to manage their incidents get these insights automatically as we ingest data from tools such as Slack, Jira, and Zoom and combine it with HR systems data. Customers also have the ability to manually ingest data or trigger ingestion via our API.

VMblog:  Jeli seems to focus on people metrics more than typical SRE system metrics.  On one hand, this makes Jeli a more collaborative and cross-team tool.  But SREs that are responsible for keeping things running still need system data.  So do SREs need another Incident Management tool alongside Jeli to get that technical insight?

Jones:  We do focus on the people, but alongside the technology- going back to the socio-technical focus- looking at both, together, is critical. The Jeli platform combines metrics across the people and tools involved in an incident, with the understanding of the socio-technical systems that incidents happen within. This approach to incident management delivers a much more accurate view of the full picture of an incident than what you often see from simple SRE system metrics. The result is a more comprehensive and efficient analysis to help you identify consistent stresses, see patterns, and make data-driven decisions across your systems and people. Organizations are then able to move from reactive to proactive, addressing contributing factors to incidents before they occur and helping minimize the impact of future incidents through continuous improvement. 

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