Service Quality Assessment for NASA´s Deep Space Network: No longer a luxury

When NASA´s Deep Space Network (DSN) was established almost a half century ago, the concept of computer-based service delivery was impractical or infeasible due to the state of information technology As a result, the interface the DSN exposes to its customers tends to be equipment-centric, lacking a clear demarcation between the DSN and the mission operation systems (MOS) of its customers. As the number of customers has continued to increase, the need to improve efficiency and minimize costs has grown. This growth has been the impetus for a DSN transformation from an equipment-for-rent provider to a provider of standard services. Service orientation naturally leads to requirements for service management, including proactive measurement of service quality and service levels as well as the efficiency of internal processes and the performance of service provisioning systems. DSN System Engineering has surveyed industry offerings to determine if commercial successes in decision support and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions can be applied to the DSN. A pilot project was initiated, and subsequently executed to determine the feasibility of repurposing a commercial Business Intelligence platform for engineering analysis in conjunction with the platform´s intended business reporting and analysis functions. This paper surveys the challenges, the lessons learned, and highlights the interesting results to date. It will also highlight the technologies applied to achieve these goals including: 1) Business Intelligence Software 2) Data Warehousing 3) ETL (Extract, Translate and Load) techniques 4) Complex Event Processing.