Workshop on Organisational Aspects of Human Error and Systems Failure
 
 
        Monday, 30th August 1999, Edinburgh, Scotland.
 
        http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~johnson/Organisational_error.html
 
 
 
Themes:

Human error has long been seen as a contributory factor in the causation and exacerbation
of major accidents.   In the past, this has resulted in an emphasis upon the individual
human factors that lead to error: high workload; fatigue; poor situation awareness etc.
However, there is an increasing realisation that accidents can only be prevented by also 
looking at the organisational factors that place individuals in situations where they are 
likely to make errors. This workshop will provide a common forum for academics and 
practitioners to review techniques that can be used to identify and avoid these error 
inducing contexts.

Our intention is to focus on techniques that can be easily integrated into existing systems
engineering practices.  We welcome contributions that discuss the impact of new technology
in safety-critical organisations.  This includes workplace studies, ethnography and more
focussed forms of human reliability analysis.  We also welcome papers that consider the 
managerial problems associated with maintaining a safety "culture" with existing equipment 
and legacy systems.  This would consider the way in which risks analysis must inform and be
informed by wider organisational objectives.  We also encourage contributions about the 
and legislative frameworks that govern both the design and operation of safety-critical systems.
The following (incomplete) list includes some of the higher level questions that will be 
addressed:

        - is it possible to predict the effect that organisational change will have on 
          the safety of an application either in terms of human `error' or systems `failure'?
        -  do previous failures provide a useful means of assessing the impact that 
           organisational factors have upon the safety of future systems?
        -  is it possible to extend incident reporting systems from the narrow confines of 
           operator error and component failures to provide effective warnings about 
           wider managerial and regulatory issues?

It is NOT necessary to submit a paper in order to attend the event but please register your
interest with the organisers as places are limited.
 
 
Deadlines:
 
Authors should submit extended abstracts (approximately 3 sides of A4/US letter) to Chris
Johnson, see below, to arrive no later than July 15th 1999.   Authors will be notified
of the programme committee's decision and revised full papers must be returned by August
15th for inclusion in the proceedings.   Full papers, up to twenty-five pages of A4,
will be selected for a forthcoming book to be edited in this area.

Programme Committee:
 
Henning Andersen, Danish National Laboratory, Risoe.
John Dowell, Department of Computing Science, University College London.
Erik Hollnagel, HRP, Norway.
Denis Javaux, Psychologie du Travail, Universite de Liege, Belgium.
Chris Johnson, Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow,
John McCarthy, Applied Psychology Department, University College Cork.
Peter Wright, Department of Computing Science, University of York.
Still being finalised...
 
Further Information:
 
Prof. Chris Johnson,
Department of Computer Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QJ, Scotland.
email:   [log in to unmask]     tel.:    +44 141 330 6053   fax.:    +44 141 330 4913




%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%