DART: A Data Analytics Readiness Assessment Tool For Use In Occupational Safety

The safety industry is lagging in Big Data utilization due to various obstacles, which may include lack of analytics readiness (e.g. disparate databases, missing data, low validity) or competencies (e.g. personnel capable of cleaning data and running analyses). A safety-analytics maturity assessment can assist organizations with understanding their current capabilities. Organizations can then mature more advanced analytics capabilities to ultimately predict safety incidents and identify preventative measures directed towards specific risk variables. This study outlines the creation and use of an industry-specific readiness assessment tool. The proposed safety-analytics assessment evaluates the (a) quality of the data currently available, (b) organizational norms around data collection, scaling, and nomenclature, (c) foundational infrastructure for technological capabilities and expertise in data collection, storage, and analysis of safety and health metrics, and (d) measurement culture around employee willingness to participate in reporting, audits, inspections, and observations and how managers use data to improve workplace safety. The Data Analytics Readiness Tool (DART) was piloted at two manufacturing firms to explore the tool's reliability and validity. While there were reliability concerns for inter-rater agreement across readiness factors for individual variables, DART users agreed on and accurately assessed organizational capabilities for each level of analytics.