Microsoft Visio 2010 Customer Solution Case Study Healthcare Organization Optimizes Infrastructure Monitoring with Visual Dashboard Solution Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute Uses Visio 2010 add-in for System Center to Improve Decision Making, Reduce Costs, and Enhance Overview Country or region: United States Industry: Healthcare Customer Profile Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute (PCLI) is one of North America’s most unique and experienced eye care facilities. Founded in 1985, PCLI has performed over 300,000 micro eye surgeries. Business Situation PCLI’s IT Department wanted a better way to monitor and evaluate the health of their IT assets and infrastructure beyond text-based reports from Microsoft ® System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. Solution PCLI developed a customized, visual system management dashboard using Microsoft Visio Professional 2010 and the Visio 2010 Add-in for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 that provided real-time system health information. Benefits Improved decision making through increased visibility into IT asset health, both locally and remotely Improved helpdesk performance through reduction in Tier 2 “With Visio 2010 we can now visually monitor system status in real time, which allows us to mitigate some major problems by quick and informed actions, and respond better to those we can’t mitigate.” Overview Founded in 1985, Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute (PCLI) is a premiere eye care facility specializing in LASIK procedures and cataract care, with locations throughout the Pacific Northwest. To effectively manage its IT systems and assets, PCLI’s IT Department utilizes 4-6 different monitoring programs to monitor the health and responsiveness of its technology at any time. PCLI wanted to make it easier to monitor overall system health by combining existing Visio infrastructure diagrams with the detailed system health data. Using the Visio 2010 Add-in for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to create a custom visual dashboard of its assets, PCLI’s IT department was able to increase visibility into asset health, reduce Tier 2 helpdesk escalations and issue resolution time, and enable more of its staff to leverage system health information to make better decisions.
Transcript
Microsoft Visio 2010Customer Solution Case Study
Healthcare Organization Optimizes Infrastructure Monitoring with Visual Dashboard SolutionPacific Cataract and Laser Institute Uses Visio 2010 add-in for System Centerto Improve Decision Making, Reduce Costs, and Enhance Performance
OverviewCountry or region: United StatesIndustry: Healthcare
Customer ProfilePacific Cataract and Laser Institute (PCLI) is one of North America’s most unique and experienced eye care facilities. Founded in 1985, PCLI has performed over 300,000 micro eye surgeries.
Business SituationPCLI’s IT Department wanted a better way to monitor and evaluate the health of their IT assets and infrastructure beyond text-based reports from Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.
SolutionPCLI developed a customized, visual system management dashboard using Microsoft Visio Professional 2010 and the Visio 2010 Add-in for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 that provided real-time system health information.
Benefits Improved decision making
through increased visibility into IT asset health, both locally and remotely
Improved helpdesk performance through reduction in Tier 2 helpdesk escalations and time to resolve tickets
Broader IT staff usage of system health data without increasing training
“With Visio 2010 we can now visually monitor system status in real time, which allows us to mitigate some major problems by quick and informed actions, and respond better to those we can’t mitigate.”
Jeffrey Grimes, Systems Engineer, Pacific Cataract and Laser InstituteOverviewFounded in 1985, Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute (PCLI) is a premiere eye care facility specializing in LASIK procedures and cataract care, with locations throughout the Pacific Northwest. To effectively manage its IT systems and assets, PCLI’s IT Department utilizes 4-6 different monitoring programs to monitor the health and responsiveness of its technology at any time. PCLI wanted to make it easier to monitor overall system health by combining existing Visio infrastructure diagrams with the detailed system health data. Using the Visio 2010 Add-in for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to create a custom visual dashboard of its assets, PCLI’s IT department was able to increase visibility into asset health, reduce Tier 2 helpdesk escalations and issue resolution time, and enable more of its staff to leverage system health information to make better decisions.
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SituationHaving performed over 300,000 micro eye surgeries, Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute (PCLI) is one of North America's most unique and experienced eye care facilities. Founded in 1985 in Chehalis, Washington, PCLI is a referral and consultation facility specializing in LASIK procedures and cataract care, and complements the expertise of optometric physicians throughout the Pacific Northwest. The Institute provides high caliber medical care in the areas of cataract surgery, LASIK surgery, glaucoma care, corneal care, eyelid surgery, and retinal care.
PCLI’s IT Department is comprised of approximately thirteen employees, and is responsible for the management and maintenance of all software and hardware connected to the corporate network, from traditional servers and desktop hardware to specialized medical equipment.
To effectively manage both local and remote systems and assets, PCLI’s IT Department staff utilize 4-6 different monitoring programs to understand the health and responsiveness of their technology at any given time. The department’s primary tool for evaluating system health is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (SCOM). SCOM provides an API that system administrators can use to communicate with their servers and extract status and performance data from various systems.
SCOM provides PCLI IT staff with a text-based listing of many different system issues, but it was difficult to effectively review issues raised and identify systemic issues from a text display. According to Jeffrey Grimes, a Systems Engineer in PCLI’s IT Department, SCOM is a good tool for tracking data and understanding what is happening across systems at any given time, but it operates more like a back end application with a limited user interface. This made it difficult to interpret system health indicators and data, particularly for IT department staff unfamiliar with the application. “If the tool isn’t easy to use, no one will use it. It’s useless to overwhelm your IT staff with system information, because you can’t process the information quickly enough to identify systematic issues,” explains Grimes. “What we wanted was a simple tool that could give us the majority of the information needed to make logical decisions around what to do next.”
Difficulty accessing and interpreting system health information had a number of impacts on PCLI’s IT department: Increased system downtime,
as staff could not always interpret systematic issues fast enough to pre-empt failures,
Increased training costs to teach IT staff to use the system and interpret data,
Increased time required to resolve helpdesk tickets as Tier 1 staff would have difficulty isolating issues,
“What we wanted was a simple tool that could give us the majority of the information needed to make logical decisions around what to do next.”Jeffrey Grimes, Systems Engineer, Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute
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coupled with an increase in Tier 2 helpdesk traffic,
Increased labor costs to the IT department, as more senior resources were required to monitor system health and translate SCOM reports, and
Increased maintenance costs for applications, hardware, and network infrastructure.
As with many IT departments, PCLI had developed a series of Microsoft Visio diagrams to document their technology infrastructure. These diagrams were used primarily as a reference point and did not provide any dynamic information regarding the systems and assets depicted. PCLI wanted to investigate a potential solution that could combine their existing Visio infrastructure diagrams with the detailed system data provided by SCOM.
SolutionPCLI turned to Visio 2010 for a way to visually combine their SCOM data with their Visio-based infrastructure diagrams. PCLI wanted to use Visio 2010 as a front-end dashboard for their SCOM data and use it to provide a graphical view of system and asset health, such that it would be very easy for someone to quickly develop a comprehensive view of PCLI’s system health.
Jeffrey Grimes had heard about a Visio 2010 add-in that could connect PCLI’s existing Visio diagrams to SCOM and provide much of the desired functionality. The Visio 2010 Add-in for System Center
Operations Manager 2007 R2 combines the strengths of two applications widely used in enterprise IT to simplify the creation of customized graphical dashboards showing the management and monitoring of IT infrastructure. The Visio 2010 Add-in for SCOM would provide PCLI with a number of important features: Easily create new Visio
diagrams and link shapes to any managed object (computer, database, web site, perspective etc.) to show the current health state,
Automatically link entire existing Visio diagrams to the computer and network devices managed by SCOM by matching computer names or IP addresses,
Publish and Refresh diagrams from the browser using the SCOM data adapter for Visio Services in SharePoint 2010, making SCOM a data source for the client and the server.
Export diagrams from the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Console as Visio diagrams, automatically showing live health state information on the exported objects when opened in Visio
With these requirements and features in mind, PCLI set out to incorporate the Visio 2010 Add-in into their MPLS Wide Area Network interconnecting 17 sites in 6 states (AK, WA, OR, ID, MT, NM), which included 62 physical servers, 32 virtualized servers/desktops, approximately 275 business desktops,
“We can use our Visio dashboard to quickly find the device and see if there are any alerts or underlying performance issues to review.”Jeffrey Grimes, Systems Engineer, Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute
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approximately 100 PC based medical devices, and 127 networked printers. To do this, PCLI deployed SharePoint® 2010 over the course of two days, and then set out to design the Visio 2010 dashboard. PCLI was able to design, test, and deploy their Visio 2010 dashboard solution over the course of two weeks, “Though we easily could have done this in less than a day” if not juggling competing priorities, explained Grimes.
BenefitsWith their new Visio 2010 solution in place, PCLI expects to realize a number of benefits across decision making, helpdesk performance, and IT staff adoption.
Improved Decision Making through Increased VisibilityOne of PCLI’s most important benefits relates to their improved ability to make decisions based on visually presented system data in Visio
2010. Previously critical system health information was obscured within their system monitoring tools. With their Visio 2010 solution, PCLI can visually monitor IT asset health in real time using their dashboard. Explains Grimes, “If someone calls the helpdesk about slow network performance or other problems, we can now immediately see what's happening. We can use our Visio dashboard to quickly find the device and see if there are any alerts or underlying performance issues to review.” Grimes estimates that their Visio 2010 dashboard will save the IT Department between 3-5 minutes each time they need to remotely access a computer or device, an activity they perform at least a few times every day and can take between 10 and 30+ minutes to complete.
In addition to responding to specifically identified issues, PCLI’s Visio 2010 solution will enable the IT Department to proactively identify and address problems before they happen through better system health visibility, whether in PCLI headquarters or in one of their other facilities across the United States. If a given asset is experiencing problems or goes down, the Visio 2010 dashboard displays a red indicator, making it easy to isolate problems. Key system health status issues that could have gone unnoticed in the past are clearly visible in the Visio 2010 dashboard, allowing for better advanced diagnosis of problems and fewer unplanned application and system outages.
Figure 1: PCLI’s Systems Architecture Dashboard using Visio Professional 2010
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According to Grimes, “We’ve been very happy with Visio 2010 as a front end dashboard to our systems architecture. We can now visually monitor system status in real time, which allows us to mitigate some major problems by quick and informed actions, and respond better to those we can’t mitigate.”
Improved Helpdesk PerformancePCLI expects their Visio 2010 solution to further reduce the number of helpdesk tickets received as well as decrease the number of tickets escalated to Tier 2/3 support. PCLI’s helpdesk is managed by the IT Department and includes approximately six rotating staff, with three additional IT resources providing Tier 2/3 support. In the past, as many as 25% of helpdesk tickets would be escalated to Tier’s 2 and 3, in many cases because the Tier 1 staff could not effectively identify and isolate system and hardware problems. With their Visio 2010 dashboard, all of PCLI’s helpdesk staff including Tier 1 will be able to better answer questions, but also be able to address many of the questions right away over the phone, or at least quickly identify triggers for a Tier 2 escalation. The IT Department expects a decrease in the number of helpdesk tickets escalated to Tier 2, a faster time to ticket resolution, and an overall improvement in customer satisfaction.
Broader IT Staff Adoption without Increased Training
Another important benefit of PCLI’s Visio 2010 solution is increased IT Department staff usage of system health data. With the visual dashboard in Visio 2010, IT Department staff can get up to speed quickly on the overall systems architecture and understand any issues quickly, without requiring in depth training on system monitoring tools. This will further allow staff to develop a broader understanding of current system interdependencies and allow for more informed decisions regarding system upgrades, network changes, hardware improvements, or any other proposed infrastructure changes.
Microsoft Visio 2010The advanced diagramming tools of Microsoft® Visio® 2010 help you simplify complexity with dynamic, data-driven visuals and new ways to share on the Web in real-time. Start by building your diagram with a diverse set of professional-looking templates and modern, pre-drawn shapes. Then, easily link your diagram to popular data sources (such as Microsoft®
Office Excel®). You’ll see data automatically refresh right within your diagram, reflected in vibrant visuals such as icons, symbols, colors and bar graphs. Finally, with just a few clicks, publish your data-linked diagram to Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010, and provide access to others on the Web, even if they don’t have Visio. Together, simplicity, data-driven shapes, and Web sharing make Visio one of the most
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For more information about Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute products and services, call 800-224-7254 or visit the Web site at: www.pcli.com
The Visio 2010 Add-in for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 can be found here: http://visiotoolbox.com/downloads/addins/Visio_2010_Add-in_for_System_Center_Operations_Manager_2007_R2_961.aspx
Legal DisclaimerThis case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published May 2010.
