Overall, after conducting the interviews with senior and junior technical and strategic staff, from the enterprise IT company and SME, it was clear that the awareness of employees shaped matters in different ways. Most people are clearly looking at the patterns in the business and work environment to shape their own understanding, while others prefer to understand and follow work procedures/rules to construct their professions, and finally others
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prefer to communicate, interact and share experience and knowledge with their work colleagues to build a comprehensive understanding that is influenced socially. Regarding the influencers and change drivers, the companies are different in their motivation and change drivers. The research shows that the enterprises and SMEs have clear different drivers for change, where change in enterprise companies is mostly pushed from external sources and in SMEs is mostly pushed from internal resources. This is because the enterprise companies have a strong position in the market, and all they need to do is conform and react to external changes in order to maintain this position, whereas SMEs have more limitations in their capabilities and resources. However, companies need to be aware of the risk of relying on trends; trends can help SMEs in approaching customers with a strong market grounding, but it will not help them to understand fully business and market behaviour (e.g. in the case where disruptive technology is introduced) in-depth future forecasting for all possible scenarios is required. Job security, career path clarity and long-term strategy are much lower for SME staff than staff in enterprise companies: staff attitude is basically built based on past experience, and this is how they predict the future, based on their past experience in certain companies. Nevertheless, technical staff are less concerned about decision-making, company position and value generating than strategic staff, who stand on top of their responsibilities. Staff from all levels and organisational types are more likely to use informal communication to resolves issues raised during the work process: easy and fast methods are preferred for communication, discussion of work and the achievement of agreement. In the end, uncertainty does not make people feel comfortable, but, luckily, human nature conforms to self-organisation and means of survival, which make them able to feel optimistic about what will happen to them in the work environment.Large enterprises consider technology as a strategic capability, where part or all of the business model relies on technology and technology innovation, and some other companies use technology heavily in their business activities to support the primary processes, communication, analysis and reporting. Finally, it is often in small enterprises that the technology has minimum involvement, mainly in office applications, emails and supporting data sheets. Enterprises are aware of competitors’ technical capabilities, and always try to adopt something similar (latest technology and practices). The funding theme conforms with the classification of new requirements presented in Miller et al. (2009): this offers a supportive background to the research process and results.
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Most importantly, in this chapter new descriptive guiding principles have been presented which enable analysts to understand the current complex and dynamic socio-technical environment. These principles emerged through the application of complexity theory to socio-technical systems in order to interpret information collected from the interviewees based on theoretical assumptions, thus helping to provide a better description of the complex socio-technical systems and provide principles to handle the analysis, design and operation of socio-technical systems (Table 11):TABLE 11: SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS AND DESIGN GUIDELINES
Principle guideline Description
The dynamics of the organisational environment is an input to the organisation’s internal aspects
Analysts should understand and consider the fact that the environment is dynamics
Knowledge as a key asset Enterprise must have a holistic knowledge of the enterprise activities and enterprise environment Analysts and designers as evolvers
of internal design with context
The enterprise Analysts and designers should take the initiative to bring external knowledge to internal design continuously
Structure vs. dynamics Enterprise needs to have both structural and dynamic models in order to help understanding different enterprise settings
Strategy and rules as a governance hub
Enterprise should establish a clear strategy and directives to govern the enterprise activities.
Technology architecture as enforcement level
Technology must enforce the rules and help to fulfil the strategy
Design vs. architecture Enterprises should take into design consideration the long term scalable architecture, and more flexible designs that mostly will change more frequently Personal goals vs. organisational
goals
Enterprises should be aware about the impact of staff personal goals, and align it to strategic goals as possible
Autonomy vs. control Staff activities most organized in structured processes with very detailed specific performance measures. Lower-level activities form the
higher image
Enterprises should be aware about the impact of actual activities in the operational level. These practices which actually form the enterprise overall performance and the general image
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Chapter Five: Socio-technical
Systems Modelling Framework
The main objective of this chapter is to propose a holistic analysis and design framework for socio-technical systems that can deal with dynamicity and complexities by building enterprise models integrated with reasoning and dynamic modelling capabilities in order to support decision-making, increase insight and efficiency and reduce the complexity of socio-technical systems analysis and design. A framework was proposed to meet the socio-technical analysis and design challenges called Reasoning in Dynamic Business Motivation Model (RDBMM). The RDBMM framework will have three contributions: 1) Metamodel levels containing artefacts and separated into different views; 2) Implementation process consisting of a set of steps and practices; and 3) Selecting a set of supportive modelling tools to represent the artefacts as formal models.