Based on the premise that technical system has a great effect on social system (personal attitudes and group behavior)
The term socio-technical system was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.
Based on
Socio-technical systems: From design methods to systems engineering
Gordon Baxter⁎ and Ian Sommerville
Interacting with Computers Volume 23, Issue 1, 2011, Pp. 4-17.
http://iwc.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/1/4.full
The term socio-technical systems was originally coined by Emery and Trist (1960) to describe systems that involve a complex interaction between humans, machines and the environmental aspects of the work system—nowadays, this interaction is true of most enterprise systems. The corollary of this definition is that all of these factors—people, machines and context—need to be considered when developing such systems using STSD methods. STSD methods mostly provide advice for sympathetic systems designers rather than detailed notations and a process that should be followed.
There are five key characteristics of open socio-technical systems (Badham et al., 2000):
Systems should have interdependent parts.
Systems should adapt to and pursue goals in external environments.
Systems have an internal environment comprising separate but interdependent technical and social subsystems.
Systems have equifinality. In other words, systems goals can be achieved by more than one means. This implies that there are design choices to be made during system development.
System performance relies on the joint optimisation of the technical and social subsystems. Focusing on one of these systems to the exclusion of the other is likely to lead to degraded system performance and utility.
STSD methods were developed to facilitate the design of such systems.
Mumford (2006) provides an historical overview of developments in STSD. The general aim was to investigate the organisation of work, with early work in STSD focused mostly on manufacturing and production industries such as coal, textiles, and petrochemicals. The aim was to see whether work in these industries could be made more humanistic. In other words, the intention was to move away from the mechanistic view of work encompassed by Taylor’s (1911) principles of scientific management, which largely relied on the specialisation of work and the division of labour.
The heyday of STSD was, perhaps, the 1970s and the early part of the 1980s. The XSEL (eXpert SELler) system of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was developed using STSD (see Mumford and MacDonald, 1989 for a retrospective view). It was an expert system designed to help DEC sales staff assist customers in properly configuring their VAX computer installations. This system was a success and at its peak the family of expert systems, including XSEL, that were being used to support configuration and location of DEC-VAX computers was claimed to be saving the company tens of millions of dollars a year (Barker and O’Connor, 1989). The example illustrates that socio-technical approaches can be used effectively in real systems engineering.
The late 1980s and early 1990s also saw the emergence of ethnographic studies of work, stimulated by Suchman’s (1987) seminal research at Xerox PARC. These ethnographic approaches (e.g., Heath and Luff, 1991) highlighted the significance of socio-technical issues in the design of software-intensive systems (e.g., Blomberg, 1988).
The 21st century has seen a revival of interest in socio-technical approaches. The ideas appear in areas such as participatory design methods, CSCW and ethnographic approaches to design. Indeed, one of the key tenets of STSD is a focus on participatory methods, where end users are involved during the design process (e.g., Greenbaum and Kyng, 1991). However, these methods, all of which have their roots in STSD, differ in important respects. Participatory design, which covers a whole range of methods (e.g., see Muller et al., 1993), often involves the users (or user representatives) effectively moving into the territory of the system developers for the duration of the project. By contrast, empathic design (Leonard and Rayport, 1997) and contextual design (e.g., Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1999), which reflect STSD ideas, adopt the inverse view and put the developers into the users’ world as part of the development process.
The field of CSCW came about partly in response to a need to discuss the development of group support applications (Grudin, 1994), but it has implicit roots in socio-technical thinking. Bowker et al. (1997) make the link explicit, dealing with the socio-technical system and CSCW, as does the recent special issue of the journal Computer-Supported Cooperative Work which deals with CSCW and dependability in health care systems (Procter et al., 2006). The field of dependability (Laprie, 1985; Avizienis et al., 2004) is also intrinsically concerned with socio-technical systems, although this field sometimes uses the term ‘computer-based systems’ to refer to socio-technical systems.
Socio-technical ideas are equally applicable in other settings where technology is deployed. In recent years, there has been an increasing uptake of technology in the home, particularly as smart home technologies and assistive technologies. Sommerville and Dewsbury (2007), for example, developed a model for the design of dependable domestic systems, which adopts a socio-technical view in which the system comprises the user, the home environment, and the installed technology.
http://cptransform.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/sociotechnicalsystem/
Philosophy of Socio Technical Systems
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v4_n3html/ROPOHL.html
Reviewed Work: Management of Work: A Socio-Technical System Approach by Thomas G. Cummings, Suresh Srivasta
Review by: Fremont Shull
The Academy of Management Review
Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1977), pp. 700-703
The Management of Socio-technical Systems using Configuration Modelling
Simon Lock
http://www.dirc.org.uk/publications/articles/papers/57.pdf
Sociotechnical Management Model for
Governance of an Ecosystem
Antonio J. Balloni1
, Adalberto Mantovani Martiniano de Azevedo2
and Marco
Antonio Silveira
International Journal of Managing Information Technology (IJMIT) Vol.4, No.3, August 2012
http://airccse.org/journal/ijmit/papers/4312ijmit01.pdf
Updated 18 Sep 2015, 13 May 2014
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