Technology

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is an agency that is under the umbrella of the United States Department of Labor. The agency was created in 1970 by the United States Congress under the Occupational Safety and Health Act that was signed by President Richard Nixon.

1. The organizations mission
The mission of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is ensuring that illnesses, injuries and occupational fatalities are prevented in workplaces. OSHA achieves this mission by the provision and putting into force the rules and guidelines which are generally referred to as the workplace standards for health and safety. Ensuring of a healthy and safe workplace is the core mission of OSHA. OSHA maintains that all the workers are entitled to a working environment that is free from harms, illnesses and injuries. OSHA recognizes the importance of safety in the workplace environment in the improving of the economies of states. The need to address this problem of workplace safety in a growing economy is the main mission of OSHA and comes to be recognized after an observation that majority of illnesses and injuries are recorded among the newly employed workers in a rapidly growing economy (U.S. Department of Labor, n.d). This mission has been reflected in most private sectors where the employees and their employers have worked to eliminate job-related hazards.

OSHA authorizes and enforces all the standards that are developed under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of the 1970. It is the mandate of the OSHA to assist and encourage different states in their efforts to realize safer and healthful conditions of working. The agency has a mandate of providing support and guidelines for the states in their effort to provide information, research, training and education in the area of occupational safety and health.

2. The environment within which the organization operates
According to the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, all the states are mandated to build up and operate their individual workplace safety programs. However, it is the OSHA that approves and supervises various state plans. This means that OSHA operates in different state governments that run competitive and not-for profit programs. It is often a requirement that before the states run OSHA programs, there has to be an assurance from the OSHA main office. OSHA provides up to 50 percent of the total operating costs of the approved plan (Rees, 1998, p.12).

To date, there are a total of 22 states as well as jurisdictions that are operating complete state plans. These state plans cover both the private sector and the state including the employees in the local government. In addition to the 22 jurisdictions and states that operate complete state plans, five other states, Illinois, Connecticut, new York, new jersey and the virgin islands have also joined in the covering the complete OSHA state plans although they cover only the public employees. For the state to get approval from OSHA for a developmental plan, the state has to assure OSHA that it will have in place, within three years, all the structural elements that are needed for an effective program of occupational safety and health (Elsie, 2000, p.22). The elements that are necessary include the appropriate legislation, a sufficient number of fully qualified enforcement professionals and the procedures and regulations for the setting of standards. The final approval of the state to carry out the OSHA programs is the ultimate accreditation.

3. A key challenge facing the organization in fulfilling its mission
Perhaps one of the most pressing problems that OSHA faces is the inefficiency of the existing Management Information System that has poorly addressed the enormous increase of silica exposure to workers in the marine, construction and general industries.  This has as a result led to the failure in the some of the implementations of various state plans that should contribute to its smooth running. This problem is not unusual for most of the agencies operating in many different states. It therefore requires a fully updated Integrated Management Information System to properly manage a number of programs in different states.

This problem of lack of a proper Integrated Management Information System has for instance resulted to the poor management of problems such as noise pollution and other management issues within OSHA and all its state offices. Perhaps, most of the regulations in the manner OSHA operates cause it to have problems of failures to implement most of the plans. This problem stems up because of its limitation constitutionally (Kohn, 2001, p.29). The lack of constitutional mandate has resulted to a number of mistrusts from the public.

According to the provisions of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, there should be a good working environment for all the workers which ensure that their safety is well addressed. OSHA gets misses the requirement of this provision when it comes to its capacity of being unable to regulate the noise pollution in a number of states that have already subscribed to it. The problem of noise pollution has been widespread especially the noise that comes from industries and automobiles has caused an enormous debate among the environmental activists and other policy makers including the public (Kohn, Michael, 2004, p.34).The current state of OSHA surveillance system is the reliance of the manual methods that have turned out to be erroneous, sluggish and ineffective in the process of accessing critical data regarding the problems such as noise pollution. There are also problems arising from the physical or manual methods of data interpretation. These problems have been augmented by the poorly updated Information Management System and the over- reliance on the human or manual methods of data analysis.

The use of weaker systems of Information Management Systems has also resulted to majority of companies to have little trust on the data that is obtained from OSHA. The agency which is expected to be authoritative to states and all the companies managed under it should have a consideration of updating the manner in which operations are carried out. An example of these updated include the critical update of the information systems which run most of the operations in the agency. OSHA inspects the working conditions of the employees in the states that have subscribed to it (Kim, 2006, p.36). The enforcement of the laws provided by the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 may not be possible if there is some form of mistrust within the OSHA operations.

4. Use or potential use of information and information systems to help meet this key challenge
In meeting the challenge of poor data collection and analysis as well as other implementation problems, OSHA has identified key areas of tackling the problem. The implementation of the OSHA Information System (OIS) is core to the management of a number of challenges that have faced OSHA since inceptions. The OIS suite will ensure that there is sufficient compliance assistance, voluntary evaluation of programs, outreach and consultation. The suites will also incorporate the middleware of open standards and a data center that is central which will ensure the integration of data from the OSHA Laboratory, State Consultation Programs, State OSHA Plans and the Federal OSHA (Charles, 2000, p.10). The use of analytical tools by the adoption of the OIS will enable OSHA to generate reports that are necessary in the management of various operations. The problem of silica exposure for instance may be tamed with the applications of the advanced Information Systems.  

The adoption of the advanced tools of OIS will enable OSHA to easily identify fatalities, injuries and illnesses as well as provide the visibilities into the working populations having the highest illnesses and injuries risks. At the same time, this technology will enable OSHA to allocate the resources to the exact areas where they are most needed. This will ensure that no replications are made while allocating of the resources meaning that the process will be cost effective for the running of OSHA programs (Kohn, 2001, p.45).

The OIS suite will place OSHA in a capacity of reducing the injuries, fatalities and illnesses through the enforcement, outreach, and compliance assistance as well as through the consultations. It is expected that the OIS will fully support the expansion of e-government projects and also supporting all the strategic goals of OSHA. The OSHA goals that need to be achieved through the OIS will address some of the challenges such as the irreplaceable legacy of the software and hardware of the IMIS system, the absence of some applications that support various business processes that were implemented in 1992 and the inability of legacy IMIS to completely support the DOLOSHA missions and strategic plans (Weil, 1996, p.130).

5. Analysis of current or potential societal policy challenges from use of the information system
In the application of the appropriate information technology in the efforts of reducing the challenges that OSHA has been facing, a number of benefits have already been seen while other benefits are to be realized in the future. However, there are a number of challenges that affect the application of any technology with most of these challenges emanating from the society where these technologies are to be applied. The social concerns can greatly affect the way technologies are implemented and advanced in any setting and OSHA has to make clear some of these challenges and address them appropriately.

The access of information through the network poses a lot of controversies on who is to access the information in a legal manner. With the rise of computer network insecurities, setting up a system that manages information of different companies and states on a network will attract unauthorized access and abuse of privacy. According to the OSHA Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), the application of the technology does not pose any dangers on the access of information by the unauthorized individuals and declares that it is safe for companies to embrace the technology because all the logical and physical security controls are fully implemented and all the personnel with the access into the personally identifiable information (PII) are cleared as per the requirements of the Homeland Security Presidential Detective 12 (HSPD-12) (Kohn, Michael, 2004, p.57)

The issue of cost of the technology still hampers the larger portion of its implementations in organizations. There is therefore a need to develop cost effective technologies that will easily be implemented while costing not too much. This issue however has been considered and OSHA proposes for all the information systems to be cost effective for easier operations.

6. How the organization might reduce concerns while still meeting its goals in the use of technology. The potential applications of OIS and other related technologies are intense which implies that the technology wills heavily impact the mode of operations within OSHA and the partners. It cannot be afforded to lose the benefits of such great tools because of the lack of properly addressing the needs of a society. At the same time, it is the society that holds OSHA and without the society OSHA will be functionless (Rees, 1998, p.61). It is therefore important to address issue of cost effectiveness and computer security for effective implementation of the technology.

Some of the steps that have to be taken to fully address the issues of privacy of the information over the internet include the heightening of the level of information security which will only allow the authorized users to access information in the network. The mounting of network security will keep the hackers at bay hence protecting the privacy of companies. The second problem is the affordability of the system that will be sued in the management of information. OSHA may be required to adopt the use of cheaper computer systems with affordable but still safer operating systems that will be cheaper to most of the companies.