Incorporation of Human and Organizational Factors in Incident Investigation Processes – The Practitioners Perspective

Abstract

Serious incidents continue to occur in industry. Irrespective of industry type and work task the same types of incidents are continuing to repeat themselves and the same conclusions drawn regards the role of the human operator in incident development. Although substantial amounts of research has been undertaken to understand the human contribution to organizational incidents little research has been done to explore whether or how these discoveries have been implemented in the field. To address this gap we surveyed industry practitioners to determine their perspectives on the use of human and organizational factors analysis as part of current incident investigation processes. Results showed that the majority of practitioners indicated that human and organizational factors analysis was already being implemented to some degree in current incident investigation processes. However they also indicated that threats existed to successful identification of human and organizational factors issues and the subsequent implementation of recommendations to address them.