Paul R. Schulman

Designing Infrastructures: Dilemmas of Design and the Reliability of Critical Infrastructures

Critical infrastructures (CIs) are ‘balky systems’ of highly diverse, networked components with such high performance variations among them that there are few modal behaviors that characterize these infrastructures as whole systems. Consequently, they are under-determined with respect to design principles and the control variables available to operators. These features raise significant reliability challenges in the management of CIs. In particular, formal design strategies increasingly applied to these infrastructures threaten to undermine the skills and cognitive capacities of control operators and middle-level ‘reliability professionals’ to manage them reliably and safely. We investigate these challenges and propose new design principles to protect and enhance high reliability management in CIs.

Assuring high reliability of service provision in critical infrastructures

Vital services that are provided through critical infrastructures such as electricity and mobile telecommunication present us with a paradoxical development: society demands increasing levels of reliability of these services as we grow more dependent on them, while at the same time the conventional organisational means with which to ensure those high levels of reliability are being dismantled. Developments such as liberalisation, technological innovation and outsourcing have made the provision of highly reliable services through critical infrastructures increasingly the product of networks of organisations, rather than individual or a limited set of organisations. A key question for next generation critical infrastructures is therefore: how can networks of organisations, many with competing goals and interests, provide highly reliable services in the absence of conventional forms of command and control and in the presence of rapidly changing circumstances, technologies and demands? This paper reports on extensive field research that suggests the answer to complexity, and institutional change may be found in real time.

Adhocracy in policy development

Abstract Since the 1930s, the president and other high officials frequently have used ad hoc organizations. The Hoover Commission, the Committee on Civil Rights, the Gaither Committee, the Scrowcroft Commission, and the Tower Commission are afew examples. The form may be called adhocracy. These temporary bodies build agendas, evaluate major blunders, resolve deadlocks, and even operate like regular agencies. The growth of adhocracy is a symptom of failure of the regular government and presents dangers of inadequacy, lack of accountability, and threats to democracy.

Toward a Comparative Framework for Measuring Resilience in Critical Infrastructure Systems

Abstract A major problem in building community resilience in the face of disasters is understanding resilience as an organizational property. A fundamental problem in this understanding is the imbalance in disaster research between the large number of variables and the relatively few cases involved. While resilience is a complex process with many variables at work in determining outcomes, disasters afford far fewer cases with which to compare and understand the multitude of these variables. This is especially true when disasters have a great deal of variety and seldom occur in the same places over the same set of community and organizational variables. Under these conditions it continues to be difficult to isolate causal, much less predictive, factors in resilience. This research has found that far more events challenge resilience in communities and organizations than might be assumed, were one looking only at disasters. In fact organizations can signal their readiness for resilience through measurable responses to far smaller-scale performance challenges. This paper presents a strategy for developing resilience indicators in critical infrastructures that would allow comparative assessment of risks to resilience across infrastructures in different sectors and communities. The strategy is illustrated in resilience indicators developed within one infrastructure, a large and complex high-voltage electrical grid. This strategy is extended and its potential analytic application to additional infrastructures and to the assessment of compound inter-infrastructure reliability is discussed.

Problems in the Organization of Organization Theory: An Essay in Honour of Todd Laporte

This essay examines a peculiar problem in organization theory its failure to achieve useful research-based prescriptions for organizational design and practice in the face of challenges posed by new technology and evolving social problems. It is argued that an important part of this problem in organization theory is the under-specification of its major concepts. Three under-specified concepts in particular are examined complexity, interdependence and scale. The analysis of these concepts is undertaken in the context of Todd LaPortes work to promote, through well-posed questions, clearer and more specific formulations of these and other concepts as independent variables in organizational analysis. The essay concludes with suggestions for continuing the specification of major concepts in organization theory in ways inspired by LaPorte.

A control room metric for evaluating success and failure in high reliability crisis management

Abstract The focus of this article is specific: we propose a metric for evaluating crises that start in or require the response of control rooms of major critical infrastructures. Rather than addressing the vexed issue of how to evaluate crisis management in terms of success or failure, we focus on a subset of crises that carry with them a standard for evaluating how they are managed. We begin with a central focus in research on high reliability management, namely, critical control room processes. The skills of control operators do not disappear when crises beset critical infrastructures they manage and we discuss the role of control operators in crisis management. A “crisis cycle” is described for control operators and we conclude with its use as a proposed standard for describing high reliability in crisis performance and for evaluating the degree of success or failure of such crisis management. This metric has implications for evaluating the role of crisis leadership and evaluating the role of Incident Command Systems in crisis management. We do not argue that our proposed approach to evaluating crisis management in terms of control room performance is appropriate for all types of crises, all types of crisis management, all types of high reliability organizations, or even all types of critical infrastructures.

Comparing Emergency Response Infrastructure to Other Critical Infrastructures in the California Bay‐Delta of the United States: A Research Note on Inter‐Infrastructural Differences in Reliability Management

This research note summarizes observed similarities, differences, and mixed similarities and differences between emergency responders in Californias emergency response infrastructure and control room operators in some other critical infrastructures there. The dissimilarities are all the more striking given the many similarities. The chief difference, we speculate, lies in the conditions on and skills of control room operators to ensure the continuous and safe provision of the critical service in question, even during (especially during) turbulent times – what we have called ‘high reliability management’. This management differs considerably from the active crisis management of many emergency responders, although both groups seek to manage ‘reliably’.

Risk Management of Interconnected Infrastructures: An Empirical Study of Joint Stress Conditions

This chapter has been written for engineering practitioners, support staff and researchers interested in how to assess and manage risks that arise because critical infrastructures are interconnected, and increasingly so. Infrastructures are large technical systems for water, electricity, transportation, telecommunications and financial services, among others, whose assets and services are considered vital to society. These engineered systems operate under legal, regulatory and mission mandates to be highly reliable, that is, to ensure the safe and continuous provision of the critical service in question, even during (especially during) peak demand or turbulent times. Because they operate under high reliability mandates, their control operators and staff take risk assessment and management seriously. This chapter focuses on what we consider to be neglected but extremely important topics related to the assessment, management and tracking of risks at the interconnected critical infrastructure system (ICIS) level. Special features of infrastructure control rooms are discussed, and an empirical analysis demonstrates conditions under which interconnected infrastructures share risks for joint management purposes.