Revisiting the Aviation Safety vs. Networking discussion

Mikael Abrahamsson swmike at swm.pp.se
Fri Dec 25 10:57:41 UTC 2009


On Fri, 25 Dec 2009, Vadim Antonov wrote:

> The ISP industry has a long way to go until it reaches the same level of 
> sophistication in handling problems as aviation has.

Well, to counter this one might talk about the medical business (doctors) 
which hasn't been able to embrace the checklists at all (apart from in a 
few places), and they still consider their profession to be a craft, just 
like most network engineers do.

It's the classical "good/fast/cheap, please pick two". Aviation is 
slow/careful to bring in new tech, same with the health care side, they're 
both very conservative. We in the network business are still immature but 
quick and flexible, but as time goes on, our services are more and more 
important, and thus things settle in and slow down, but becomes more 
reliable. This is an evoltion that'll take quite some time, but it's 
already changed a lot the past 10 years.

There was quite a buzz regarding doctor checklists a few years back, I 
read several articles about it, but now I can't find the one I want to 
find, but <http://www.healthbeatblog.org/2007/12/pilots-use-chec.html> 
talks a bit about the topic.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se




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