Organizational learning for the incident management process : Lessons from high reliability organizations
Wilem J. Muhren, Gerd Van Den Eede, Bartel Van de Walle · Research portal (Tilburg University) · 2007
Mainstream organizations typically struggle in their quest to combine effectiveness with efficiency, or reliability with flexibility.Experimentation and trial-and-error are regarded as important processes for organizational learning, but do not always lead to an organizational-wide optimum in terms of efficiency.Certain organizations, so-called High Reliability Organizations (HROs), exist that operate in hazardous environments but manage to structure themselves to be efficient and stay highly reliable.These organizations in high-tension industries are deprived from the luxury of going through trialand-error learning, but we state that exactly this is accountable for the HROs' success.Through a case study of the IT Incident Management process at a large European financial services provider, we investigate how people involved in a process of such a mainstream organization, where reliability is of great concern, can learn from HROs to achieve a greater reliability while working efficiently.It appears that the characteristics that make an HRO distinct from other organizations are -at least to some extent -present in the IT Incident Management process.Our main conclusion however is that considerable opportunities remain unseized to lift the HRO qualities to a still higher level.