2.2.1 Socio-technical Systems: Origin and Evolution
The Socio-technical system (STS) is "a term devised to avoid the rather simplistic technological determinism in much mainstream organisation theory. It was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in England - UK, and used in the theory of organisational choice which guided their program of applied research" (Emery and Trist, 1960). Socio-technical systems theory focuses on social aspects, people and society, and technical aspects related to organisational mechanistic, processes and technology, here, the term ‘technical’ does not necessarily refer to material technology (Ropohl, 1999; Leal et al., 2012). The focus is on procedures and related knowledge, ‘Technical’ is a term used to refer to structure and technicalities in a broader sense. Socio-technical refers to the relationship between the social and technical aspects of an organisation or society as a whole (Sommerville, 2004). In organisational development, a socio-technical system is an approach to complex organisational work design that recognises the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. Therefore, any system that contains social elements and technical elements will be considered to be a socio-technical system. We also see the enterprise as a socio-technical system: this definition conforms with the understanding presented by Appelbaum (1997), Mumford (2000), Griffith and Dougherty (2001). Socio-technical theory, as distinct from socio-technical systems, proposes a number of different ways of achieving joint optimisation. These are usually based on designing different kinds of organisation in which the relationship between social and technical elements leads to the emergence of productivity and well-being. Nowadays, socio-technical systems are more complex, with most people not working for or within a single organisation. Usually, they do business collaboratively across organisational, geographical, cultural and temporal boundaries in a world that has become more ‘flat’. The social requirements in virtual spaces are very similar to those in physical spaces, although geographically distributed organisations are complex, with increasing virtual complexity, since the virtual world becomes an extension of the physical world, with a certain degree of adaptability to cope with technological specifications and capabilities. Unfortunately, virtuality and fuzzy identity make social rules less easy to control or measure (Brown et al., 2007). Human systems are always subject to error. On the other hand, there are more and more technological inventions, and the virtual community is expanding very quickly. It is difficult to apply the same policies used to govern physical spaces to universal communities in cyberspace, yet many countries are still working to develop mature cyberspace regulations. The so-called ‘knowledge society’ is much more advanced than previous societies, since it incorporates a wide diversity of many areas: cultural, physical, environmental, national
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criminal justice systems and international agreements. Knowledge flow, human learning and advancement have all increased rapidly, and physical and virtual spaces are more greatly fused (Zhang and Jacob, 2011). A few years ago, competition was quite different. An organisation or firm that owned knowledge and skills had an advantage over its competitors. Nowadays, competition is greater, and all of the players have the ability to gain knowledge and skills to some extent when assuming the validity of an ‘equal opportunity field’. As social networks expand, communication amongst more players is easier, and the learning process is rapidly accelerating in all types of firms, enterprise, medium, small, government, commercial, services, etc. Moreover, human activities have had a clear impact on the environment and natural resources. Since the current business system is shaped as a global network, any change in one of its nodes will cause an impact on others in this network. The interrelationships between business, economy, ecology and human activities are complex, increasing the complexity of the socio-technical systems.2.2.2 Approaches to Analysing and Designing Socio-technical Systems
In general, socio-technical systems research considers both the social and technical perspectives of organisational work in order to increase understanding and design comprehensiveness and integrity. The social systems perspective looks into social relations, interaction, skills, problem solving and the management of different situations, while the technical perspective aims to improve reliability, efficiency, control, speed and the accuracy of information flow within the socio-technical aspects by integrating and enhancing knowledge sharing and process management.
Baxter and Sommerville (2011) made considerable investigations and classified the literature on socio-technical systems into four areas: 1) Designers of work and the workplace; for example, Mumford (1983) proposed the ETHICS method, which is an approach to combining user needs within the work environment, participation, organisational structure, and job design into an extension of the socio-technical approach. 2) Information systems; such as the work done in large-scale enterprise systems (Taylor, 1982; Avison et al., 2001; Summerville et al., 2012). 3) Computer-supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) such as the approach presented in Clarke et al. (2003) and Fischer and Hermann (2011) which highlights the importance of communication and collaboration in the socio-technical system. Fischer and Hermann (2011) list different types of communication in the socio-technical environment. They also propose five principles of socio-technical meta-design. These principles primarily fall into the social aspect of the socio-technical system, as follows: a) Cultures of participation; b) Empowerment for adaptation and evolution; c) Seeding, evolution growth and reseeding; d) Underdesign; and e) Structure of communication for ‘Designing the in- between’. These encourage the adaptation of knowledge management techniques,
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collaborative design and work and distributed control as well as improving understanding of emergent behaviour. 4) Cognitive systems engineering: approaches belonging to this classification rely on the investigation of the relation between human and organisational issues (Hollnagel and Woods, 2005; Woods and Hollnagel, 2006). 5) Human-computer interaction; for instance, human-centric concepts can be found in Hendrick (2008), who identifies five main viewpoints in human-system interface technology: a) Human-machine interface technology; b) Human-environment interface technology; c) Human-software interface technology; d) Human-job interface technology; e) Human-organisation interface technology. Finally, 6) Ubiquitous computing. Some other works under this category are related to usability in design (e.g., Mayhew, 1999; Krug, 2005; Fox, 1993) and user-centred design (e.g., Norman and Draper, 1986; Gulliksen et al., 2003).Some of the problems facing current approaches to socio-technical systems analysis and design are confirmed in Baxter and Sommerville (2011). According to this review, these approaches lack detailed investigation and are inconsistent. The problems are as follows: 1) Fieldwork issues; 2) Inconsistent terminology; 3) Levels of abstraction; 4) Lack of agreed success criteria; 5) Conflicting value systems; 6) Analysis without synthesis; 7) Perceived anachronism; and 8) Multidisciplinary. However, the multi-disciplinarity and level of the analyses of socio-technical researches is acknowledged (Sawyer and Tapia, 2007), but possibly necessary difficulty, because different analytical goals may require different levels of analysis and different focus.
A question raised here is how can an organisation be improved by paying equal attention to the understanding and optimisation of its social system and technical system? Assumptions are merging to form strategic planning pillars that influence business development. An example of such a pillar is the EPISTEL framework (Environment, Political, Informatic, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal) for strategic planning (Clapham and Pestel, 1978). Such as socio-technical approach aims to include social and ecological systems in information systems and technology design to bridge the gap in complex and dynamic systems by increasing situational awareness and making sense of the social environment. Modelling socio-technical systems is important from an engineering perspective in order to bridge the gap between the 'social’ perspective and the ‘technical’ perspective. Involving and understanding the social aspect is important for building and generating sustainable information systems in order to serve and interact with social actors. Still, little work have been done in aligning social and technical perspectives together (Morris, 2009).
For instance, trust is one of the key areas investigated by socio-technical scientists, who have studied how it affects the entire organisation and how it flows from humans into the design
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and configuration of technology. Mayer et al. (1995) and Costigan et al. (1998) have all performed pioneering work in this area, providing an integrative model of organisational trust. First, trust facilitates decentralised decision-making, which in turn improves credibility and response time (reactivity) within the overall system. Second, trust facilitates undistorted communication amongst social actors, which improves the accuracy of information throughout the social system. Third, trust allows different organisations and teams to form smooth partnerships and hold effective negotiations: understanding these aspects will positively influence the enterprise design (Yu and Liu, 2001). The VPEC-T framework (Hunt and Bacon, 2009) is a relatively new enterprise analysis framework based on systems thinking, and integrates trust within the enterprise modelling effort.Practically, the social system drives the need to generate productivity and develop other supportive activities, such as identifying the sympathetic differences between the descriptive levels in a social system, for example distinguishing between macro-level (e.g.: collective or aggregate phenomena), meso-level (e.g.: social interaction among social agents) and micro- level (e.g.: the belief systems of individual social agents). In this case, there is a tendency to look at the social system as a multi-agent system that allows social parameters to be formulated in formal logic and transferred to technical specifications. There are macro-micro relationships between descriptive levels. The macro levels emerge from the micro levels (the lower level incorporating the higher level), and there is a causality relationship between the macro properties and the micro properties. This is a reflection of the concept of emergence in a complex adaptive system. In return, the interchange between macro and micro levels is usually modelled as nonlinear phenomena. The most significant challenge in this domain is to satisfy the social requirements of human-centric technology and create value from computer software for social needs. Therefore, this will influence the design process for underlying information and technology systems while highlighting the need to focus on interactions within and between complex socio-technical systems. Those interactions involve multiple dimensions of human-technical factors, i.e. physical, cognitive and psychosocial dimensions. This collaborative creativity becomes necessary when designing such a complex system. Critiques have been conducted based on the socio-technical literature to classify the focus perspectives of this literature within the development lifecycle (x =partly support, xx = support) as in Table 2:
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TABLE 2: SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEMS DESIGN APPROACHES AND THE DEVELOPMENT PHASES OF THE SYSTEMS ENGINEERING PROCESSLiterature/Reference Theory Design
Focus Analysis Process Assessment & Evaluation Cherns' (1976, 1987) Principles XX ETHICS (Mumford, 1983, 1995) X XX X X Ethnographical Workplace analysis (Hughes et al., 1992)
X X
Cognitive Work Analysis (Rasmussen et al., 1994; Vicente, 1999)
XX
Distributed Cognition (DC) (Hutchins, 1995) X XX Scandinavian approaches (e.g., Bjerknes and
Bratteteig, 1995)
X X X
Contextual Design (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1999)
X XX X
Clegg's (2000) Principles XX
Socio-technical method for designing work systems (Waterson, et al., 2002)
X X
Cognitive systems engineering (Hollnagel & Woods, 2005)
X XX X X
Human-centred design (International Standards Organisation, 2010)
X X X X
STS a Meta design perspective (Fischer and Herrmann, 2011)
X XX X X
STS levels requirements (Whitworth, 2006, 2009)
X XX X
Another analysis of the literature was conducted to understand the focus of the approaches proposed by authors, classifying studies based on their social focus, technical focus or general considerations of technical and social aspects as described in Table 3:
TABLE 3: SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEMS LITERATURE CLASSIFICATION
Social Focus Literature Both approaches
Review and Discussion
Technical Focus Literature
Hughes et al.,(1992) Damasevieius (2007) Bryl et al. (2009) SSM: Checkland (1981);
Checkland and Scholes (1999)
Baxter and Sommerville (2011)
Greenwood and Sommerville (2011) CWA: Rasmussen et al.,
(1994b); Vicente (1999)
Alter (2010) Sommerville (2004) EWA: Hughes et al. (1992) Ropohl (1999) Lock (2004) Hunt and Bacon (2009) Whitworth (2006) Dwyer (2011) Mumford (1983; 1995) Beyer and Holtzblatt
(1999)
Waterson et al. (2002)
Lu and Jing (2009) Benders et al. (2011)
2.2.3 Reflection on the Socio-technical Systems Literature
The literature on socio-technical systems stresses the need for a comprehensive framework using a systematic process to understand, analyse and design socio-technical system artefacts (Morris, 2009). Two important limitations have been identified:
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1- The social and technical aspects are rarely examined together in the socio-technicalsystems literature.
2- The socio-technical systems literature has failed to provide a clear systematic and detailed analysis and design approach especially for IT-Business alignment.
The limitations of the current methods have driven the research into literature outside the domain. Interesting work has been done in enterprise modelling literature that conforms to the theoretical principles of socio-technical systems analysis and design requirements and helps to better human-machine alignment within their environment. Enterprise Modelling (EM) aims to model both human driven activities and information systems (Loucopoulos and Kavakli, 1995). Although most of the EA effort focuses on the hard aspects of organisational and technical activities, the possibility of addressing the social and soft aspects within EM work is highly desired, and several efforts have been made in this direction (Yu, 2009; Baxter and Sommerville, 2011; Jarke et al., 2011). Moreover, a massive number of modelling languages have also been proposed to fulfil the needs of enterprise modelling that consider human and technical systems as well as different types of real life scenarios. Later, I will recommend a set of selective tools to support the thesis argument.