What’s the current status of infrastructure health?
What exactly is broken in infrastructure operations? Why are enterprises around the world still grappling with downtime?
Our research, as well as that of others, points to the human element. Over 70% of all outages are caused by human error. This is baffling – the people responsible for running the infrastructure are some of the smartest people out there. I meet them regularly, they know their job well. Many of them have a decade or more of experience in what they do. Still, mistakes occur. Why is that?
A few years ago, the Idaho National Laboratory, which is a US Department of Energy laboratory, published a short paper regarding human error in the energy industry. It is amazing to see the resemblance between human error in different industries. They point to a few critical issues causing human error:
- Lack of time to adequately complete the task.
- Stress – physical and mental.
- Complexity of the task at hand.
- Experience and training.
- Missing or insufficient procedures and work processes.
- Poor human-machine interaction (think – user interface).
- Physical fitness (sick? tired?)
