SAFECOMP 2008 Keynote Speakers
Erik Hollnagel
Prof. Erik Hollnagel
Industrial Safety Chair
Ècole des Mines de Paris (France)
Critical Information Infrastructures: Should Models Represent Structures
or Functions?
The established approaches to CIIs all come from the analysis and
assessment of technical systems. They emphasise how such systems are
structured, using the classical principle of aggregation and
decomposition, and descriptions are given in terms of whether components
and/or subsystems work or fail, and whether they are available and
reliable. In order for this approach to be valid, two assumptions must
be fulfilled. First, that adverse outcomes arise from failures and
malfunctions of systems, subsystems, and components. Second, that the
effects of failures or malfunctions propagate linearly. Such models have
been very successful for purely technical systems, i.e., systems where
the impact of humans and/or organisations was negligible, but are
ill-suited to address the safety issues of socio-technical systems.
Technical systems can in principle be completely specified, and the
quality of their performance depends on how well they can be prevented
from deviating from the requirements. Socio-technical systems always are
underspecified to some degree, and their normal performance must be
variable in order to compensate for the incompleteness of the
specifications. The issue for socio-technical systems is not how
components can fail but rather how normal performance variability can
combine in an unforeseen manner, leading to adverse outcomes. For
socio-technical systems it is therefore more important to describe their
function than their structure. The presentation will discuss how a
functional model may be applied to CIIs.
About Erik Hollnagel
Erik Hollnagel (PhD, psychology) is Professor and Industrial Safety
Chair at Ècole des Mines de Paris (France) and visiting professor at the
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim
(Norway). He has since 1971 worked at universities, research centres,
and industries in several countries and with problems from several
domains, including nuclear power generation, aerospace and aviation,
software engineering, healthcare, and land-based traffic. His
professional interests include industrial safety, resilience
engineering, accident investigation, cognitive systems engineering and
cognitive ergonomics. He has published more than 250 papers and authored
or edited 13 books, some of the most recent titles being "Resilience
Engineering Perspectives: Remaining Sensitive to the Possibility of
Failure" (Ashgate, 2008), "Resilience Engineering: Concepts and
Precepts" (Ashgate, 2006), "Joint Cognitive Systems: Foundations of
Cognitive Systems Engineering" (Taylor & Francis, 2005) and "Barriers
and Accident Prevention" (Ashgate, 2004). Erik Hollnagel is, together
with Pietro C. Cacciabue, Editor-in-Chief of the international journal
of Cognition, Technology & Work.