Corporate Governance in Minimizing Disasters
Corporate Governance in Minimizing Disasters
1. Introduction
This coursework is designed to look at the design and monitoring within organisations to ensure disasters don¡¦t happen. There have been many disasters in recent history such as Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Challenger, Chernobyl and the Herald of Free Enterprise. All calamitous events that represent loss of human lives, damage to the environment and loss in financial terms. Obviously, great care is taken to avoid such occurrences and this essay concentrates on the processes that address these issues.
With the natural expansion and development of the global marketplace companies are under increasing competition to perform. Management is subsequently under pressure to introduce enhanced processes and technology to deliver improvements in operational efficiency.
From such developments transpire new and unknown human-machine interfaces and the role of humans in operating these systems. This is where the vital role of governance lies, and defines the manner in which design processes and operation are undertaken within an organisation.
Governance also looks at understanding of the information contained within their system and the dispersion of this information and knowledge throughout the organisation.
Disasters can be caused by a variety of sources such as technical or environmental but this focuses on the human factors, and desired elimination of, in causing such catastrophic system failures. By its very nature human error is impossible to eliminate in totality. It is useless to attempt to change human nature; progress is made in designing the system to safely operate with humans as an integral part of the process. I believe it impossible to ensure no disasters will occur in the future, but this essay will look at the methods used to keep the possibilities of such disasters occurring to a minimum.
I will look at the processes and principles applied to design and monitoring within organisations, where appropriate highlighting relevant case studies to illustrate my points.
2. Why disasters happen
Disasters are more likely to occur with progression in technology and the complexity of systems. Over the past 30 to 40 years a technological revolution has occurred in the design and control of high-risk systems.
This has brought about radical and still little understood changes in the tasks that the human operator is expected to perform. There are several factors affecting human performance in such systems and different types of human error need to be recognised.
2.1 Types of Errors
Each disaster has various contributory factors but it is...