Question

Congratulations! You are the CEO of GE. GE company culture is all about quality and process improvement!

You are leading a company meeting where you need to convince and inspire your employees that Quality Systems will be the tools to market your Brand and skyrocket your revenue.

12. What is the swiss cheese model for security? Explain to your employees the risks of quality vulnerabilities.

13. What is the Domino effect? Explain to your employees how one quality issue escalates to several company functions, and spreads to the entire supply chain.

Answer 1

12. Swiss cheese model of security and accident causation is a model which is commonly used in risk analysis and comprehensive risk management. This model also serves the foundation for layered security as well as computer security. The human systems are metaphorically treated as layers of swiss cheese, which have been stacked side by side in a row. Any malicious attack on the security of the system has to pass through the different layers and the impact gets mitigated substantially. This mechanism is often referred to as the cumulative act effect.

It is quite important to have a cohesive risk management system in place as the system gets quite vulnerable to malicious attacks and threats. The quality quotient as well as the performance of the overall system gets compromised in absence of such a system.

13. Heinrich’s Domino Theory illustrates that any accident is not an independent incident and happens as a result of various sequential activities. These sequential activities are metaphorically referred to as dominoes.

The various dominoes that can be associated with an accident or system attack are:

• Ancestry and Social Environment
• Fault of Person
• Unsafe Act or Unsafe
• Accident or attack
• Damage or injury

In business, the application of domino effect lies in the fact that if the system gets vulnerable from just one dimension or layer, the threat of malicious attack creeps in and has considerable impact of the overall system. Hence, overall quality protection of business is essential.