Developments in the Safety Science Domain and in Safety Management From the 1970s Till the 1979 Near Disaster at Three Mile Island

Objective: What has been the influence of general management schools and safety research into causes of accidents and disasters on managing safety from 1970 till 1979? Method: The study was limited to original articles and documents, written in English or Dutch from the period under concern. For the Netherlands, the professional journal De Veiligheid (Safety) has been consulted. Results and conclusions: Dominant management approaches started with 1) the classical management starting from the 19th century, with scientific management from the start of the 20st century as a main component. During the interwar period 2) behavioural management started, based on behaviourism, followed by 3) quantitative management from the Second World War onwards. After the war 4) modern management became important. A company was seen as an open system, interacting with an external environment with external stakeholders. These schools management were not exclusive, but have existed in the period together. Early 20th century, the U.S. 'Safety First' movement was the starting point of this knowledge development on managing safety, with cost reduction and production efficiency as key drivers. Psychological models and metaphors explained accidents from ‘unsafe acts’. And safety was managed with training and selection of reckless workers, all in line with scientific management. Supported by behavioural management, this approach remained dominant for many years, even long after World War II. Influenced by quantitative management, potential and actual disasters after the war led to two approaches; loss prevention (up-scaling process industry) and reliability engineering (inherently dangerous processes in the aerospace and nuclear industries). The distinction between process safety and occupational safety became clear after the war, and the two developed into relatively independent domains. In occupational safety in the 1970s human errors thought to be symptoms of mismanagement. The term ‘safety management’ was introduced in scientific safety literature as well as concepts as loose, and tightly coupled processes, organizational culture, incubation of a disaster and mechanisms blinding organizations for portents of disaster scenarios. Loss prevention remained technically oriented. Till 1979 there was no clear relation with safety management. Reliability engineering, based on systems theory did have that relation with the MORT technique as a management audit. The Netherlands mainly followed Anglo-Saxon developments. Late 1970s, following international safety symposia in The Hague and Delft, independent research started in The Netherland

Enabling the new economic actor: data protection, the digital economy, and the Databox

This paper offers a sociological perspective on data protection regulation and its relevance to design. From this perspective, proposed regulation in Europe and the USA seeks to create a new economic actor—the consumer as personal data trader—through new legal frameworks that shift the locus of agency and control in data processing towards the individual consumer or “data subject”. The sociological perspective on proposed data regulation recognises the reflexive relationship between law and the social order, and the commensurate needs to balance the demand for compliance with the design of computational tools that enable this new economic actor. We present the Databox model as a means of providing data protection and allowing the individual to exploit personal data to become an active player in the emerging data economy.The authors acknowledge the support of the EPSRC, Grants EP/M001636/1, EP/M02315X/1, EP/N028260/1, and EU FP7 Grant 611001.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from [PUBLISHER] via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-016-0939-

Accountable Internet of Things? Outline of the IoT databox model

© 2017 IEEE. This paper outlines the IoT Databox model as a means of making the Internet of Things (IoT) accountable to individuals. Accountability is a key to building consumer trust and mandated in data protection legislation. We briefly outline the 'external' data subject accountability requirement specified in actual legislation in Europe and proposed legislation in the US, and how meeting requirement this turns on surfacing the invisible actions and interactions of connected devices and the social arrangements in which they are embedded. The IoT Databox model is proposed as an in principle means of enabling accountability and providing individuals with the mechanisms needed to build trust in the IoT

The Impact of Disruptive Technologies in Finance and Accounting: A Systematic Literature Review

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceThe digital transition era, marked by a strong evolution of Information Technologies, and its massive expansion towards all products, services, and sectors, has changed all known methods for carrying out and conducting all sorts of professional practices. Within the scope of accounting activities and transactions related to accounting, various tasks have started to be automatized with the help of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Hence, no longer existing the need of spending time on some of the repetitive day-to-day tasks, professionals in these areas will have more time and freedom to perform predictive business analysis, to collect and report financial data, which will most likely become vital to assist decision-making and possible attraction of new investments. As such, there is a clear link between accounting and the emergence of disruptive technologies, which indicates an interesting research area for accounting information systems researchers. What is the impact of disruptive technologies in accounting practices? What is the role played by accountants to work alongside their digital colleagues? What are the skills that accountants may have to be future proof in an ever-changing digital environment? This dissertation aims to answer these questions by following a qualitative and exploratory approach, through a systematic literature review. The analysis reveals that the impact of disruptive technologies in finance and accounting can be summarized in four main domains, Strategic Management, Technology Innovation, Business Acumen and Operations and Accounting Provision. We review the content of recent academic literature regarding the relationship between disruptive technologies and accounting and highlight research gaps and opportunities for future research

Demonstrating GDPR accountability with CSM-ROPA: extensions to the data privacy vocabulary

The creation and maintenance of a Register of Processing Activities (ROPA) are essential to meeting the Accountability Principle of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We evaluate a semantic model CSM-ROPA to establish the extent to which it can be used to express a regulator provided accountability tracker to facilitate GDPR/ROPA compliance. We show that the ROPA practices of organisations are largely based on manual paper-based templates or non-interoperable systems, leading to inadequate GDPR/ROPA compliance levels. We contrast these current approaches to GDPR/ROPA compliance with best practice for regulatory compliance and identify four critical features of systems to support accountability. We conduct a case study to analyse the extent that CSM-ROPA, can be used as an interoperable, machine-readable mediation layer to express a regulator supplied ROPA accountability tracker. We demonstrate that CSM-ROPA can successfully express 92% of ROPA accountability terms. The addition of connectable vocabularies brings the expressivity to 98%. We identify three terms for addition to the CSM-ROPA to enable full expressivity. The application of CSM-ROPA provides opportunities for demonstrable and validated GDPR compliance. This standardisation would enable the development of automation, and interoperable tools for supported accountability and the demonstration of GDPR compliance

How Grant Recipients Can Satisfy Compliance Requirements for U.S. Federal Awards

Improper grants payments stemming from weaknesses in business processes have been a focus of the U.S. president, Congress, and federal and state governments since 2009. Researchers have demonstrated that the internal control weakness at the federal, state, and local government level has contributed to the problem of compliance. The Office of Management and Budget issued federal rules effective in December 2014 to address the problem of federal award compliance. Despite these measures, there is a gap in the literature on strategies for recipients of federal grants to meet compliance requirements. The purpose of the qualitative descriptive study was to explore how recipients can satisfy compliance requirements across the full life cycle of their grants. Systems thinking and compliance theories were selected to analyze data. Participants were 20 certified grants management specialists. The research questions included inquiry on the strategies for federal award compliance. Described were participants\u27 strategies to improve business processes for grant compliance. Emergent thematic findings included staff and leadership training- as participants\u27 main strategy for complying with uniform requirements, while written policies and procedures and use of grant management software- emerged as secondary strategies. Grant managers may benefit from learning about the strategies described in this study by implementing business process improvements in their organizations. Compliant recipients of grants may have a positive effect on social change with more grant funds becoming available to states, local governments, higher education, and nonprofit organizations for the public good