Charles Perrow's "Normal Accidents". It's sort of the beginnings of a general theory of systemic risk in technology, moving away from the particulars of various technologies or management strategies. There are several technology areas he fits into his model, including civilian nuclear power, jet aircraft, chemical processing plants, and cargo ships. The model focuses on what kind of energy density is involved, how complex the actually-existing engineered system is to be in order to achieve its objective, and how bad the situation is when unexpected interactions (arising from the complexity) lead to the energy being released.

This kind of clear, higher-level thinking about technology is rare and valuable. In the IT world, there's presumably a way to use the model, substituting "data" for "energy", but I've never seen (or come up with) one.