Each day a diverse group of individuals, from SOC analysts to security directors, logs in to the Haystax Analytics Platform to perform any number of mission-critical tasks. One of these is conducting assessments — be they evaluations of personnel in an organization or safety audits of critical infrastructure facilities.

Over several recent product releases, Haystax Technology has introduced multiple enhancements to the Haystax Assessments app that will help improve the workflows of analysts, supervisors and field assessors alike.

In a major advance for employee evaluation workflows, an assessment is automatically created for an individual when his or her risk score shows significant change over a short period of time. Previously only an incident was created by this score-change trigger. In the Assets page (image below), the user can see Haystax model results and other information that led to the score change.

Moreover, the assessment is linked ‘under the covers’ not just to the asset (aka, individual) in question, but also to the related incident that was created automatically. This provides analysts with complete end-to-end visibility as to the underlying reasons an individual is being flagged as a potential risk.

Other Assessments app improvements include:

• A continuously updated log of activity related to the creation, completion, submission and approval of the assessment.
• A role-assignment function that allows administrators of a particular tenant to limit the editing of an assessment only to the individual designated to complete and submit it, so that others in the same tenant cannot alter the answers. Admins can also delegate the role of assessment approver to other trusted individuals in the tenant.
• The ability to annotate assessments.
• A tenant-level option to create a screen footer on an assessment related to its level of security classification.
• Assessment-answer text fields that support additional formatting, such as bulleted or numbered lists.

Print Functionality

Most Haystax users are very active in generating detailed assessment reports from the system. Based on their feedback, our developers have added a number of new print capabilities. These include the following:

• Assessors can now print more feature-rich assessment reports directly as PDFs, in addition to still being able to use their current browsers’ print functions. In the new PDFs, cover sheets can be automatically appended to each assessment, which is useful for example when the reports contain sensitive information that is subject to stricter dissemination requirements.
• Users can choose to print one, two or multiple sections of an assessment. For example, a school administrator or plant-safety director conducting a facility safety audit can send a single section to an outside expert for review prior to submitting the completed assessment (image below).

• The new assessment reports also feature an automatically generated table of contents page, plus footers on each subsequent page that display page numbers and identify each section of the assessment.
• Photos attached to an assessment can now be printed rather than just viewed on-screen.

Additionally, to provide further context to Haystax administrators and those reviewing and approving assessments, all individual assessments now display two, rather than one, auto-populated sections up front: 1) an Overview with key information on the assessment itself, such as start and end dates, owner and assessor names and contact details, photos, highlights and the activity log; and 2) an Asset section with meta-data related to the individual or critical facility being assessed, such as contact and demographic details, location and (if applicable) employment history.