Initial crisis agent-response impact syndrome (ICARIS)

There has been a dramatic shift in attitude among organizations regarding the probabilities of crisis occurring. Once crises were considered the domain of the contingency management team that sought the fastest means to recovery, now the entire organization is compelled to take steps intended to mitigate conditions leading to a crisis. In this paper, the authors consider the organization's 'first responders' i.e., those who become involuntarily placed in the decision making process because they are the first to become aware of the conditions which indicate impending crisis simply because they are 'on scene.' As agents of the organization, these persons will make initial decisions well before the implementation of any formal contingency plan and because their decisions will be based on incomplete assumptions, they are likely to be in error. The impact of these initial crisis-agent responses can cause irreparable damage to the organization, to the individuals within the organization, and to the surrounding environment. This tendency toward error is referred to as the initial crisis-agent response impact syndrome: ICARIS. Exercising a program that prepares all employees for the initial decisions that need to be made at the moment of crisis can mitigate problems related to this issue.</p

An Overview of the Management System for Heterogeneous Networks (MSHN) The Management System for Heterogeneous Networks

The Management System for Heterogeneous Networks (MSHN) is a resource management system for use in heterogeneous environments. This paper describes the goals of MSHN, its architecture, and both completed and ongoing research experiments. MSHN's main goal is to determine the best way to support the execution of many different applications, each with its own quality of service (QoS) requirements, in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. MSHN's architecture consists of seven distributed, potentially replicated components that communicate with one another using CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). MSHN's experimental investigations include: (1) the accurate, transparent determination of the end-to-end status of resources; (2) the identification of optimization criteria and how non-determinism and the granularity of models affect the performance of various scheduling heuristics that optimize those criteria; (3) the determination of how security should be incorporated between components as well as how to account for security as a QoS attribute; and (4) the identification of problems inherent in application and system characterization.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

An Overview of MSHN: The Management System for Heterogeneous Networks

The Management System for Heterogeneous Networks (MSHN) is a resource management system for use in heterogeneous environments. This paper describes the goals of MSHN, its architecture, and both completed and ongoing research experiments. MSHN&apos;s main goal is to determine the best way to support the execution of many different applications, each with its own quality of service (QoS) requirements, in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. MSHN&apos;s architecture consists of seven distributed, potentially replicated components that communicate with one another using CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). MSHN&apos;s experimental investigations include: (1) the accurate, transparent determination of the end-to-end status of resources; (2) the identification of optimization criteria and how non-determinism and the granularity of models affect the performance of various scheduling heuristics that optimize those criteria; (3) the determination of how security should be incorporated betwe..