You’ve Heard of SIA. Do You Know Anything About PIA?

If you’ve worked in operations, you’ve probably heard of the term SIA, or Service Impact Analysis. It’s an important feature performed by our OSS that allows you to identify which services, which customers, are impacted by any given outage or deterioration of the network.

Your OSS might even initiate notifications to customers that are impacted. The more sophisticated OSS might even initiate prioritised rehabilitation activities depending on the criticality of the service/s or customer/s impacted.

But, have you ever heard of PIA?
You probably haven’t because it’s a term that I’m just coining for the first time here in this article (AFAIK anyway).

PIA stands for Power Impact Analysis. That is, to link your comms and power assets to identify how power supply impacts the health of the network – more specifically, which devices (and in turn which services / customers) are impacted when localised power supply is lost. Loss of power can be localised or can impact large sections of network. Adjacent network nodes could be impacted because they’re supplied from the same source of power or they could each be powered from different sections of the grid.

One client estimated that between 50-60% of their outages were power-related. Apparently most of these were caused not by power failures, but from the hundreds of planned outages that were underway, intentionally initiated by power utilities, across their network map at any point in time. But they didn’t store details about the power assets / network that shadowed and sustained their comms assets / network. They weren’t automatically correlating power outages with incidents in their comms network. They didn’t have the data in their OSS that allowed them to.

Does your inventory solution store the data that can give you PIA visibility?

You’ve probably noticed that RCA (Root Cause Analysis) is often mentioned in the same breath because of the similar associations that are formed using OSS / inventory data. Ever seen the term “RCA / SIA” used?

I’d like to start seeing PIA / RCA / SIA being used collectively. Power Impact Analysis triggers Root Cause Analysis, which then triggers Service Impact Analysis and proactive notifications to operators and customers alike.

 

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