What are the challenges, practices and strategies for governing reliability and safety in organizational networks?

I

Start with a question asked of a workshop’s invitees:

What are the challenges, practices and strategies of governing infrastructure reliability and safety in organizational networks?

In my mind, the questioning and answering take place in this way and order: What are the system boundaries of the operating infrastructure? What are the standards of reliability and safety being managed to for system-level operations? What are system risks and uncertainties that follow from managing to that standard for that system?

In the process of answering the three, I would specifically probe for the changing interconnectivity between and among latent and manifest boundaries, standards, and risks/uncertainties.

II

So what? Yes, definition and clarification of terms are needed, but not with respect to the initial ones of safety and reliability. In my recasting, it is case-specific system, boundaries, standards, risks/uncertainties and interconnections that are gasping for the same air now sucked away by struggles in better defining “reliability, safety and networks.”

Or to shift the analogy. For centuries, ancient Greek architecture has been praised for its pure forms and perfect proportions. Then came along those who did more site research, suggesting that the bare stone we see today could have been covered by all manner of rough stucco and garish paint. What too then of those forms we—myself included—have abstracted as reliability, safety and networks?