Identifier: belltelephone7273mag00amerrich (find matches)
Title: Bell telephone magazine
Year: 1922 (1920s)
Authors: American Telephone and Telegraph Company American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Information Dept
Subjects: Telephone
Publisher: (New York, American Telephone and Telegraph Co., etc.)
Contributing Library: Prelinger Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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done, then the error problem isbrought into sharper perspective,Bailey notes. Keep in mind, too,that this cost includes only those ac-tivities related to correcting errors.Theres also a major expense in-volved in detecting errors, espe-cially if youre using a million-dol-lar computer to do it. Figures like these tend to grabexpense-conscious imaginations,with the result that Bailey is spend-ing increasingly greater amountsof time acting as a consultant tomanagers who are anxious to cutspiraling costs, especially in expen-sive computer systems. But costlyerrors are not limited to computersystems. Certain critical classes ofoperating errors can cost as muchas $500 just to report on what ex-actly happened. Through his work as an errordiagnostician, particularly in datasystems, Bailey has been able tocorroborate his findings that thereare seven major factors that causeerror. He has dubbed his diagnosticapproach the causal factor meth-od of error control. If I go into a data system that is
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11 Wejust cant tell aboss to give his workerthe day off becausebiorythm cycles indicatethat hell probablymake an error. sick-and its sick because its cost-ing $100,000 a year more than wasexpected, and taking 50 instead ofthe expected 20 people to run it-Istart looking to see whats behindthe inefficiency. What I find is thatthe seven major causal factors tendto be identifiable — theyre present,deteriorating the performance. But whats more interesting—atleast from the standpoint of thework were doing here—is that thefactors tend to remain pretty con-sistent, statistically, in their ap-pearance in sick systems. Ranked in order of most frequentcause of errors to least, the sevenfactors are: personal factors, sys-tem design factors, documentationfactors, training factors, sourcedata factors, man-machine inter-face factors, and environmentalfactors. Bailey defines the seven asfollows: Personal factors. Perhaps themost complex and elusive causes ofhuman error. Those traits, charac-ter

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