SocioTechnical Systems Overview

A brief introduction to the area of Socio-Technical systems a new area that takes a holistic approach to the design of engineering projects which involve the interaction of both social and technical elements.

Socio-technical systems is a relatively new area which takes a more holistic approach to the development of engineering projects that involve that interaction between people and technology.

But lets start by take an example of how our traditional approach to the development of technology and social organizations works.

Take Bob and Alice, they are both web developers and they both work on the same website

But Bot is a back end web developers, he eats databases for breakfast and spends his days crunching code.

Whilst Alice is a front end web designer, she makes words sing and graphics come alive in simple and user-friendly interfaces that people love.

Every few months the site needs updating and Bob works hard behind the scenes coding away, he then hands the project over for Alice to work her magic on.

This works fine initially but as the site grows with more employees being taken on thing become a little less straight forward.

We soon have multiple people working on increasingly specialized area of the side with developers and designer often needing to interact and collaborate but finding them self's stuck in their separate departments.

Bod and Alice's site now requires a more holistic and Non-linear approach to overcome this stumbling bock as it has now become what we can call a complex socio technical system. But what do we mean by that?

Firstly it is complex in that it has multiple elements such as lines of code, databases, graphics and so on, with all of these different things needing to interact and being dependent on each others functioning.

And secondly it is socio-technical as a web site represents an interaction between the technical domains of computer software and the human interaction. For the site to function fully we need to design both areas to work together.

When we look around us we can being to see socio technical systems every where. Lets take another example,

Learn about the Systems Innovation Network on our social media:

[vanessas]

Of course the Bob is the developer and Alice the designer...

[bobwinner]

wow, who would have thought 3 minutes could seem like an hour.