The other day I posted about the intersections of Systems Safety and web operations and engineering.

One of the largest proponents of bringing a systems thinking perspective to safety (specifically ‘software safety’) is Dr. Nancy Leveson, who has been in that field (really a multidisciplinary field) for at least a couple of decades. She’s the author of a super book, Engineering a Safer World (free download) that discusses this very concept.

I also mentioned the firming up (still in the public comment timeframe) of REG-SCI which puts into place regulation (not just a recommendation or suggestion) the ARP (automation review policy) that public trading markets must comply with.

Without commenting too much on REG-SCI (I have opinions on that which I can post about at a later date) itself, I wanted to point to a Technology Roundable that the SEC had last October and invited Dr. Leveson to speak on the notion and concepts of “safe” software systems. This laid the groundwork that went into (presumably) Regulation SCI.

I clipped out her testimony, it’s about 20 minutes long, but very much worth a watch. She touches on a number of topics, but brings plain language to what organizations (both for-profit and regulatory groups, like the SEC) can expect with respect to introducing an increasing amount of technology to ‘solve’ stability issues in complex systems:

Nancy Leveson, SEC Technology Rountable 10/2/2012 from jspaw on Vimeo.

Regulation SCI is aimed towards national securities and trading exchanges primarily. And the regulation itself is almost 400 pages long. Even if the intention is to prevent the sort of calamities such as the Flash Crash, the BATS IPO event, and the Knight Capital incident…is regulation the best (or only) way to make our systems safer?