Organizational Learning for the Incident Management Process: Lessons from High Reliability Organizations

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.