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System Safety on the Precipice
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by David O’Keeffe
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Is system safety, as
a recognized discipline, on the
verge of extinction?
Maybe not, but it should qualify for inclusion
on the Endangered list. Within the U.S. Department
of Defense, the organization that drives much
of the country’s systems development and
acquisition processes, system safety is lost in
the lexicon of Occupational Safety and Health.
The latest directives emanating from the hallowed
halls of the Pentagon barely mention system safety.
DoD Directive 5000.1, the new acquisition regulation,
doesn’t mention system safety at all. Its
child directive, DoD Directive 5000.2, uses the
term once. And that is within a larger discussion
of Environmental, Safety and Health (ESH).
To add to the likelihood of
system safety’s imminent demise, the Board
of Certified Safety Professionals — you know,
the organization that provides the label many
safety professionals seek: Certified Safety Professional,
or CSP — has decided to drop the system safety
specialty certification altogether. The rationale
for this decision is economic. It simply costs
too much to maintain the specialty certification.
In other words, not many system safety practitioners
seek the CSP designation and then follow up with
a system safety subspecialty designation.
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"…the
system safety practitioner, in order to obtain
a system safety certification, must first become
certified in a discipline that is not focused
on safety engineering but on regulatory compliance…"
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Why?
Perhaps the answer lies in the definition of system
safety. As defined in Military Standard (MIL-STD)
882D, system safety is the "application of
engineering and management principles, criteria,
and techniques to achieve acceptable mishap risk,
within the constraints of operational effectiveness
and suitability, time, and cost, throughout all
phases of the system life cycle." MIL-STD-882D
then goes on to define system safety engineering
as "an engineering discipline that employs
specialized professional knowledge and skills
in applying scientific and engineering principles,
criteria, and techniques to identify and eliminate
hazards, in order to reduce the associated mishap
risk." In other words, the premise of system
safety is to design safety into a system. The
premise of ESH, on the other hand, is regulatory
compliance. Yet the system safety practitioner,
in order to obtain a system safety certification,
must first become certified in a discipline that
is not focused on safety engineering but on regulatory
compliance. This can become costly and time consuming,
with questionable practical value added.
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