Complex Enterprise Workflows
How to empower domain experts to orchestrate complex infrastructure using automation or by interacting with an abstracted representation of a system?
CONSOLIDATED JOURNEY MAP
Journey map showing various stages a typical network or security professional would go through when working with network or security devices
Closing the Translation Gap: Optimizing Automation Ecosystems to Prevent Systemic Failures
Optimizes the interfaces that eliminate the human-to-machine translation gap, allowing domain experts to deploy complex systems without coding bottlenecks. By validating abstractions and simulation guardrails, it directly reduces human error, democratizes advanced technical workflows, and prevents catastrophic real-world failures.
"How can technology empower domain experts to orchestrate complex infrastructure?"
Spanning 8 years of empirical research across MathWorks and Cisco, this research theme focused on investigating how technical specialists (network / security engineers, operators, and architects or embedded software engineers) transition from low-level scripting to high-level system orchestrations. By studying workflows across MATLAB, Simulink, Catalyst Center, and Meraki, this theme established interface paradigms that reduce cognitive friction, optimize system visibility, and increase efficiency
Mental Models
How do experts go about with their work today?
Opportunities
Identify use cases, pain points, opportunities for automation
Concept Testing
Evaluating early and late designs with end users to catch issues
Benchmarking
Track adoption, benchmark experience and identify friction points
Research Program
Connected studies conducted progressively answered different aspects of the central research question.
Campus Automation
"How to enable network engineers / architects configure and deploy their brownfield switches on Catalyst Center?"
Prioritized set of features for MVP of Campus Automation on Catalyst Center
Motor Control Blockset (0 -> 1)
"How to enable control systems engineers develop and deploy motor control algorithms on microcontrollers, FPGAs or SoCs?"
Prioritized set of features for MVP of Motor Control Blockset
Top-down Tree Architecture vs Layered Tier Architecture
Background
Current top-down tree architecture in Catalyst Center is not scalable and does not provide sufficient visibility into deployment. Large percentage of brownfield users defaulting to CLI leading to significant loss of revenue
Research Questions
- How are customers organizing their networks today?
- What are some challenges with the current way of organization?
- Understand if a layered tier architecture alleviates some of the pains?
- Evaluate all migration paths from old to new architecture
Research Approach
Key Findings
Due to NDA and intellectual property considerations, specific qualitative findings and metrics are generalized or omitted.
This research validated requirements, settled a long-standing architectural debate, and evaluated the migration paths for coverage and design.
What We Learned
Enduring common principles derived from this research theme:
Match with the real world
Domain experts would like the automated processes mimic closely with how they do in the real world
Visibility into what automation pushes
Both network/security and embedded world experts would like to first see, validate what code is pushed into the hardware before actually deploying
Research Artifacts
Empirical assets and frameworks generated to guide future enterprise-wide design and engineering direction.
Journey Maps
A comprehensive step by step flow for complex workflows - catalyst center, motor control etc.
Benchmarking Instruments
SUS scaling questionnaire to measure usability improvements
Card Sorting
Affinitized data points for designing effective information architectures
Prioritization Matrices
Kano survey on list of features generating prioritization to help with roadmaps
Wish Lists
A list of new features and enhancements requested by customers
Interview Framework
Semi-structured protocol used to query expert mental models of automation.
Additional Studies in this Research Program
This representative deep dive is one part of a much larger program of research.
Unified Networking Personas
Research Impact
The structural, organizational, and methodological contributions generated by this program.
Product Contributions
- Validated customer journeys
- Prioritized enterprise roadmap
- Identified high-value automation opportunities
Organizational Impact
- Artifacts shared across multiple product teams
- Created common vocabulary (personas)
- Aligned design decisions
Methodological Value
- Introduced new metrics for journey maps
- Introduced new prioritization methods like Kano survey
- Pioneered usability benchmarking with SUS