In its simplest form action tracking is keeping track of the status of something that needs to be done. I'm a great fan of lists, there's something quite satisfying about writing a few tasks down and then scoring them off as they complete. Of course I could keep track of my actions in any of the myriad of 'to do' apps that are out there, and they're ok for what I'd call 'simple' actions. However let's imagine we're doing something that's perhaps safety critical, you might need someone to sign off on the actions that are completed, in fact you may have a number of different stakeholders who need to be happy with the work done to complete the action.
You may also need a slightly more sophisticated reminder system than what you get with a typical app - for example you may want to be reminded within say 5 days of the due date for action completion, and you may even want other people to be informed as the action moves through its workflow
Probably the most important feature you will need is the ability to store and manage actions centrally - so rather than everyone having their own list of actions you share a single central list, that way everyone can quickly see what's coming up, what's overdue and who's responsible for what.
So if all of this has convinced you that you need to explore slightly more suitable solutions for critical action tracking we'd love to show you our Pisys 360 Action Tracking system which has been helping to keep the world's actions under control for most of the century !