Vendors are making a fuss about their Root Cause Analysis (RCA) features in their tools. People Process Things once again: who says Root Cause is in the technology?

If I wasn't a skeptic I'd say how spooky it is the way this blog pre-empts articles I've written.
Red said

most tools assume incorrectly that multiple causation is not required in managing problems

and James said

I've also always tried to push RCA back beyond the technical fault towards the kind of generic issues that impact a lot of apparantly unrelated incidents, for instance lack of effective pre-production testing

I have an article coming up on ITSMWatch that says

The lowest level event message is often not the Root Cause, so drill down data is only a symptom ... Root Cause is often a procedural error [i.e. human not machine] and no software can detect it.

When geeks invent tools to fix technical problems it's great. When they try to invent tools to fix people and process problems it's not so great.

Root Cause Analysis requires a bunch of people in a room walking through what happened and building fishbone diagrams. The root cause is not necessarily technical. My belief is that it is almost never technical.

The SAN crashed
Why?
The firmware update failed
Why?
We were missing a patch
Why? Did we check?
Yes we checked but the patch wasn't on the vendor's public support system
Why not?
They hadn't rated it critical
Why not?
Human error
Did we contact the vendor to check required patches?
No, we just looked for criticals on the system
Will we check with them for all required patches before the next upgrade attempt?
Yes
And we want a letter from the vendor saying they've fixed whatever process failed to recognise it as critical

So the cool tools tell me Root Cause was the SAN. Crap. Root cause was a negligent vendor and a negligent engineer doing the upgrade.

Vendors make this song and dance about the RCA feature in their products, but it is only a gizmo. It provides one useful input to a RCA discussion, nothing more. There is no automating RCA.