Everyone’s Responsible for Reliability

August 3, 2022

BySharada Prahladrao

Category:

Technology Trends

Reliability was the central theme of the Smart City podcast between Jim Frazer and Terrence (Terry) O'Hanlon, Publisher and CEO of Reliabilityweb.com, Uptime Magazine, and the Reliability Leadership Institute.

“It has always been about reliability,” said Terry. Talking about his background: he was the CEO of a sensor company, later worked at AT &T’s Bell laboratories and worked with the people who became World Net Services and published one of the first 5,000 commercial websites on the Internet. He was an early adopter of the web and understood the power of giving information directly to the readers. Prior to that, all the reliability information was really locked up with consultants and technology companies and there was no revenue on the web. So, the objective was to get the audience – which they did. Initially, reliability for Terry was all about sensors, but as he got exposed to the wider world of reliability, he became passionate about it.

This blog captures the essence of their conversation. You can listen to the podcast here:

Terry spoke about the initial setbacks and failures in launching industrial magazines. Later Uptime was launched, but that went through a rough patch during the pandemic. So, they decided to introduce new topics like sustainability and ESG and made it 100 percent online – that was a good decision.

Defining Reliability

Terry said that he dislikes the narrow technical definitions of reliability, such as that the asset will meet its required function over a particular period of time under stated conditions. It’s so much larger than all of that - reliability of the pump and the motor, to the system it functions in, organizational reliability, and finally reliability of the people in the organization. A simple definition would be “it works!”

Terry organized reliability into 36 different elements across five different domains, and then across the asset lifecycle to plan conferences and the publishing schedule. This has been adopted by 6,000 companies and there are 4,000 certified practitioners. He explained that this is a strategy and language that stays high level, focusing on the “what and why” (the ground reality). But to generate sustainable business success a foundational reliability leadership framework was created that has Integrity, Authenticity, Responsibility, and Background. When these factors are in place, there is effective reliability. Soon they realized that reliability is more than just maintenance, HR, operations etc. “Everyone’s responsible for reliability.”

Terry is the executive director of The Association of Asset Management Professionals, a Not-for-Profit association dedicated to contributing to creating Reliability Leaders who create a new future.

The Challenges

There are different contexts of reliability within organizations, and some are not aware of the reliability strategy, so you have to start at the basic level as to why it is needed. For example, in the automation world, there’s a lot of discussion about semantic models, interoperability APIs with the idea that there's a much more reliable, lower latency transfer of information from one place to another. “And yet in the human world, we too, are far limited by our definitions, and we might even both speak English. But you know what, we just don't agree on what the definition of a term might be. Or we might be 10 percent off,” said Terry. Further, he spoke about his experience of helping to write standards – “everyone had an idea and opinion.”