Abstract
This article responds to a need for a socio-technical systems (STS) perspective that fits in a world that has changed greatly over the decades since the socio-technical movement began. This article identifies conditions and paradoxes that limit traditional STS approaches in current business practice. A newer work system perspective (WSP) combines aspects of work system theory (WST), WST extensions, and the work system method (WSM). This WSP frames socio-technical thinking in a straightforward way that helps in describing and discussing socio-technical systems. It also provides many ideas that can help in negotiating and designing improvements. After summarizing WSP and some of its possible applications to work systems, this article uses the various topics in its title to indicate how WSP-based socio-technical thinking might be more suitable for today’s world.
Highlights
The home page of the website of the Fourth International Workshop on Socio-technical Perspective in IS Development (STPIS’18) said that “the socio-technical perspective has been around for over half a century, it is often forgotten in the IS discourse today.” Related views or concerns have been expressed in [1], [2], [3], [4] and elsewhere.This article tries to embrace and build upon central STS ideas and values in a business world in which ideas in this article’s overpacked title such as agile, lean, and data-driven are heard frequently, probably more frequently than sociotechnical
It uses the term socio-technical thinking (STT) to minimize entanglement in distinctions between different schools of STS thought related to “sociotechnical systems theory (STS-T), STS design (STS-D), and STS change (STS-C)” [6]
This article showed how socio-technical thinking based on the work system perspective (WSP) single-system view addresses aspects of a fast-moving business world that the original STS design efforts typically did not encounter
Summary
The home page of the website of the Fourth International Workshop on Socio-technical Perspective in IS Development (STPIS’18) said that “the socio-technical perspective has been around for over half a century, it is often forgotten in the IS discourse today.” Related views or concerns have been expressed in [1], [2], [3], [4] and elsewhere. First it identifies conditions and paradoxes that limit STS design in some ways and diffuse its message in other ways It summarizes a work system perspective (WSP) that combines work system theory (WST), several of the extensions of WST, and the main ideas from various versions of the work system method (WSM), a flexible systems analysis and design approach that came from the IS field and has been discussed in detail elsewhere [8], [9]. It explains how WSP supports STT and includes interests and needs of individuals and groups without forcing users and other work system participants or managers to assume the existence of separate social and technical systems. It applies aspects of WST, WSM and various WST extensions to provide a broadly applicable approach for summarizing a work system and understanding it at various levels of detail
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