Dear Leaders and Managers: Oversight Intelligence (OI) is Your Ally

It’s time to embrace an easier path forward.

Today’s business leaders are in constant pressure to improve performance, without compromising integrity, safety, the environment or quality. All the while operating with increasing cost pressures and new business models that requires them to keep costs low to remain viable. Years of increasing cost are frustrating your purpose to deliver goods and services at an affordable profit.

At the same time, you must ensure your organizations can quickly adapt to new oversight challenges, while also addressing longstanding oversight concerns.

The mitigation strategies of the past are no longer meeting the needs of the current environment. Simply put, our oversight approach today will not sustain the level of success achieved to date. 

Inability to adapt to these challenges could threaten your organization’s ability to meet the diverse and ever-increasing regulatory expectations and those of your stakeholders. At stake is the stellar reputation of your business – the currency – which your stakeholders and the communities you serve depend on.

The Need For Change

The level of integrity the public has come to expect is challenging your organization’s ability to respond to the effects of new technology, new regulations, acute global competition, and global engineering and manufacturing.

The lack of sufficient resources and clearly defined means of compliance exacerbates your organization‘s inability to effectively produce and market products ..Because history has shown organizational growth rate to be less than the growth rate of industry innovation, organizations continue to seek solutions to improve integrity while optimizing the use of its resources.

Management Oversight is Not Keeping Pace With a Dynamic and Evolving Operating Environment 

The operating environment has reached a time where significant change is needed. As the number of operating complexity increases, organizations face additional oversight and enforcement challenges. However, organization’s oversight  for identifying risks specific to resource issues, transition, and growth have largely remained the same, despite the changes in today’s operating environment.

As organizations and operational environments become more complex, interdependent, interconnected, and interrelated, modern management and oversight must evolve be proactive, data-driven, integrated, and systems-focused. 

Shifting From Reactive To Proactive Oversight

Reactive Management and Oversight

Our experience shows that the industry approach is a combination of the two perspectives, traditional and modern. The traditional perspective emphasizes compliance with regulations and is largely reactive.

In the conventional compliance-based regulatory environment, the approach to risk management is relatively rigid and prescriptive whereby regulations are used as administrative controls. A regulatory framework is supported by compliance testing and audits to assure regulatory compliance.

But management oversight is evolving through experience beyond the traditional perspective.

Many of us know that for decades, organizations and regulators, have used data reactively to identify the causes of violations and incidents, and taken actions to prevent their recurrence.

It is generally described by the following characteristics:

• The focus is on compliance with the minimum regulatory requirements;
• The level of risk is based on reported issues occurrences, with its inherent limitations, such as:

examination of actual failures only;

insufficiency of data to determine risk trends;

insufficiency of insight regarding the chain of causal and contributory events;

the existence and role of latent unsafe conditions.

The reactive (or traditional) management approach is useful when dealing with technological failures, or unusual events. However, an in-depth look into these events reveals many opportunities existed that could have prevented the event from happening.

Proactive Management and Oversight

The proactive approach to management and oversight is based on following a risk management strategy that includes identifying hazards before they materialize into adverse events or violations and taking the necessary actions to reduce the risks. Components of a proactive management strategy are:

• Unambiguous policy ensuring the senior management commitment;
• Hazard identification and risk assessment using state-of-the-art risk assessment methods;
• Confidential reporting systems used to collect, analyze and share operational safety related data;
• Competent investigation of safety occurrences with sole purpose of identifying systemic deficiencies;
• Continuous monitoring and oversight aimed to asses system performance and eliminate problem areas;
• Dedicated safety training for personnel
• Safety lesson dissemination and sharing best practices among operators and service providers;
• Building a corporate safety culture that fosters good safety practices and encourages safety communications in a non-punitive environment

None of these components will, on their own, meet expectations for improved management. An integrated use of all these components will increase a system’s resistance to unsafe acts and conditions. The consistent integration of the components of proactive system management is commonly referred to as a Augmented Management System (AMS).

MEETING THE CHALLENGE THROUGH RISK-BASED DECISION MAKING

The operating landscape has changed over the last decade. Several factors in particular have introduced change into the NAS. This includes new aerospace designs and technologies (e.g., Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)), changes in the FAA’s surveillance and oversight model (e.g., Designee Management programs) and different business models for the design and manufacture of aircraft and aeronautical products (e.g., supply chains).

Architecting Performance, Efficiency, and Choice in Oversight

Oben Legal is changing the landscape of oversight today. Oben Legal’s Augmented Management Systems (AMS) Framework delivers lifecycle organizational programs and processes that are scalable and flexible to meet the range of requirements for modern companies. We are enabling an ecosystem to design exciting new solutions that will transform the oversight infrastructure from the front lines to the board room.

Oben Legal empowers a broad and varied range of performance-based solutions that leverage a common oversight ecosystem to deliver compelling oversight scalability, flexibility, and efficiency versus legacy architectures. 

It builds on existing processes, procedures, and tools, enabling integration and interoperability across lines of business (LOB), functions and departments. It also allows for the introduction of new capabilities to meet changing requirements.

It includes enterprise-wide risk management frameworks, formal methods for identifying hazards, processes for continually assessing and controlling risk and risk performance and the promotion of a just culture.

AMS enables organizations to evolve its method of oversight from a rigid compliance-based approach to a continuous performance-based approach, in which the primary focus is on process effectiveness and high quality outputs.

Data Will Swamp the Operating Environment, Unless We Think Differently

To harvest the data opportunity in the coming years, companies must rethink their oversight approach and strategy. This means re-imagining oversight from the front lines to the board room. Leaders must re-conceive their approach to oversight and embrace new ways of thinking. Oversight and risk management must move beyond the traditional compliance-based perspective that is largely reactive, and views regulations simply as administrative or legal requirements.

Modern oversight must evolve and be more comprehensive and proactive to include effective control of clearly defined hazards. Explore our solutions to see how leading teams are transforming their oversight infrastructure and strategies today to win tomorrow.