Threat versus Vulnerability Analysis: Which approach for avoiding system failure?
How do we ensure complex systems remain resistant to failure: either from deliberate attack or as an unintended consequence of being unable to resist the stresses under which they are placed?
Conversation with a colleague about the specific risks to IT-system security identified two general alternatives, each with its own advantages and difficulties.
Threat analysis
Vulnerability [...]
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About Steve
Steven J. Spear, five-time winner of the Shingo Prize for research excellence and recipient of the McKinsey Award, is a senior lecturer at MIT and former assistant professor at Harvard. A senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, he is the author of numerous articles appearing in academic and trade publications, including the Harvard Business Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times. An active public speaker, he has addressed audiences as diverse as the Association for Manufacturing Excellence, the Shingo Prize Annual Conference, and the Institute of Medicine.
Business Strategy
Innovation
Organizational Learning
Many have called for ‘the government to create jobs’ as an antidote for slow economic recovery and persistent unemployment. All ...
C level executives are often absent from 'lean initiatives,' 'lean transformations,' and the like. This is unfortunate given the truthy cliche, ...
David Brooks's "Drilling for Certainty" correctly captures the challenge and a failure mode of managing complex systems, but the article ...
Auto Industry
Retail Sales Drop on Fall in Autos and the Role of Government in Economic Policy….In a previous post, I suggested public sentiment that government does too much but not enough is not contradictory. It reflects a recognition that government does too little of what it should do, too much of what it shouldn’t. Today’s news that retails sales were dragged down by a drop in auto purchases, a deflation [...]
High Velocity Organizations
Process Ping Ponging and Churning: three causes…three solutionsA common problem/symptom is work ping-ponging or churning. We see this problem in design, very often in services, and sometimes even in the production of a physical product.
There seem to be at least three distinct causes for this ping ponging, each with their own appropriate treatment.
1: Concurrent versus sequential design.
2: Better definition of handoff [...]
Health Care
Factory Efficiency Comes to Hospitals…NY Times July 11, 2010Healthcare is the uncommon industry in which quality, affordability, and availability don’t reliably increase simultaneously. As evident in “Factory Efficiency Comes to the Hospital” (NY Times, Sunday July 11, 2010), learning from other sectors can alter that.
Pick any product or service. What was once unreliable, rare, and costly is now dependable, plentiful, and inexpensive. Food, clothing, communication, entertainment, transportation—problems are often of over abundance, not scarcity. Not so healthcare.
