IT innovation and its organizational conditions in safety critical domains : the case of the Minimum Safe Altitude Warning System

Abstract

Safety critical organizations modernize routinely their infrastructures in order to improve safety and productivity. However, such improvement might be compromised if new tools are not delivered, or fail to be adopted by operators, or worst introduce safety critical conditions. This research investigated the interactions between innovation processes introducing new operators’ tools and the underlying organizational conditions. An application from the ATC domain, the MSAW, is taken as a main case study. Its development and history have been investigated within four European Air Navigation Service Providers. Findings indicated that the ability to set up the tool correlates to the presence of a safety net governance by which the organization develops the expertise to set up the tool over successive development cycles – no service provider encountered immediate acceptance of the tool. On the other hand opportunistic decisions to adopt the tool, mis- conceptions about its rationale, transfer of control over requirements and their implementation to manufacturer, hampered access to system parameters by ANSP personnel and increasingly rigid manufacturer-ANSP relationship in the down stream contract phase appear to relate to poor implementation of the tool and prevent prompt improvements