lomapaseo;
That the products of a preventative safety program should be measured by suitable metrics is obvious and necessary to substantiate the program. It was the lack of comprehension of what the department did and the bureaucratic requirement that was frustrating.
We called for "measurement" at every turn but received nothing in terms of feedback for the products produced nor engagement with these products. They ranged from how long an airplane had to wait at the gate burning fuel before it finally docked, to single-engine taxis in and out, (with solid, dollar-value metrics and at what weights such procedures were most effective) to the usual information, including a number of events which are known to be serious precursors to an incident. We were able to provide dispatchability in the field when the crew reported a flight control problem. Utility was however, highly selective and where 'inconvenient' the data was ignored. We still have no idea how to deal with this.
The other problem is one of accounting and it exists in all safety work; how do you show a prevented incident/accident, in short, "nothing happened", on the books? Where in normal accounting practises do such "non-events" show up as credit towards what every non-aviation accountant sees as merely a very expensive program that produces "nothing".
How do you change that perception? The only way I've ever seen it changed is through an accident which is a tremendous failure of a flight safety system and only prevents, (perhaps), the second accident.