DEVELOPING AND TESTING A MODEL OF DATA QUALITY FOR SAFETY MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY IN THE BRITISH RAILWAY INDUSTRY

摘要

Safety management information systems gather comprehensive information about safety critical incidents and accidents. They provide the basis for safety analysis and risk modelling and are thus used for strategic and operational decision-making for instance in maintenance planning and accident prevention. Therefore, data quality plays a fundamental role for the validity and reliability of safety management. In this paper a model of data quality is developed and applied to the SMIS database of the British railway industry. The model defines data quality categories and dimensions, which are used for an assessment and the subsequent identification of improvement areas. The proposed model of data quality is tested comprehensively by a triangulated approach analyzing the quality of a dataset of 7,221 workforce assaults and comparing the findings to the perceptions of data quality by safety managers from 10 of Britain’s largest passenger railway operators. The study reveals the importance of data quality checks and discusses relevant steps in assessing data quality within safety management information systems. Beyond this, the study identifies a lack of alignment to organization-specific processes as a major root cause of poorer data quality. This aspect is particularly interesting to centrally operated industry- wide safety management systems.