A purposeful collection of interrelated components working together to achieve some common objective is called System. A system may include software, mechanical, electrical and electronic hardware and be operated by people. System components are dependent on other system components. The properties and behavior of system components are inextricably intermingled.
There are two categories of a system.
Technical computer based systems
Socio Technical systems
Systems that include hardware and software but where the operators and operational processes are not normally considered to be part of the system. The system is not self-aware.
Systems that include technical systems but also operational processes and people who use and interact with the technical system. Socio-technical systems are governed by organizational policies and rules.
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| SOCIO TECHNICAL SYSTEM | MAJOR COMPONENTS OF SOCIO TECHNICAL SYSTEM |
Socio technical systems (STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society's complex infrastructures and human behavior. In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined by Eric Trist, Ken Bam forth and Fred Emery, World War II era, based on their work with workers in English coal mines Tailstock Institute in London.
Socio technical systems pertain to theory regarding the social aspects of people and society and technical aspects of organizational structure and processes. Here, technical does not necessarily imply material technology. The focus is on procedures and related knowledge, i.e. it refers to the ancient Greek term logos. "Technical" is a term used to refer to structure and a broader sense of technicalities. Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization or the society as a whole Sociotechnical theory therefore is about joint optimization, with a shared emphasis on achievement of both excellence in technical performance and quality in people's work lives. Sociotechnical theory, as distinct from sociotechnical systems, proposes a number of different ways of achieving joint optimization. They are usually based on designing different kinds of organization, ones in which the relationships between socio and technical elements lead to the emergence of productivity and wellbeing.
There are three characteristics of a socio technical system that differentiate between the sociotechnical system and the normal software.
EMERGENT PROPERTIES
Properties of the system of a whole that depend on the system components and their relationships.
Properties of the system as a whole rather than properties that can be derived from the properties of components of a system. These properties are a consequence of the relationships between system components. They can therefore only be assessed and measured once the components have been integrated into a system.
• TYPES OF EMERGENT PROPERTIES
FUNCTIONAL PROPERTIES
These appear when all the parts of a system work together to achieve some objective. For example, a bicycle has the functional property of being a transportation device once it has been assembled from its components.
NON-FUNCTIONAL EMERGENT PROPERTIES
Examples are reliability, performance, safety, and security. These relate to the behavior of the system in its operational environment. They are often critical for computer-based systems as failure to achieve some minimal defined level in these properties may make the system unusable.
EXAMPLES OF EMERGENT PROPERTIES |
PROPERTY | DESCRIPTION |
Volume | The volume of a system (the total space occupied) varies depending on how the component assemblies are arranged and connected.
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Reliability | System reliability depends on component reliability but unexpected interactions can cause new types of failure and therefore affect the reliability of the system.
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Security | The security of the system (its ability to resist attack) is a complex property that cannot be easily measured. Attacks may be devised that were not anticipated by the system designers and so may defeat built-in safeguards.
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Reparability | This property reflects how easy it is to fix a problem with the system once it has been discovered. It depends on being able to diagnose the problem, access the components that are faulty and modify or replace these components.
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Usability | This property reflects how easy it is to use the system. It depends on the technical system components, its operators and its operating environment.
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NON-DETERMINISTIC
They do not always produce the same output when presented with the same
Input because the system’s behavior is partially dependent on human operators.
“A deterministic system is one where a given sequence of inputs will always produce the same sequence of outputs.”
HUMAN ELEMENTS
People do not always behave in the same way.
SYSTEM CHANGES
System behavior is unpredictable because of frequent changes to hardware, software and data.
COMPLEX RELATIONSHIPS WITH ORGANIZATIONAL OBJECTIVES
The extent to which the system supports organizational objectives does not just depend on the system itself.
Socio-technical systems are organizational systems intended to help deliver some organizational or business goal.
If one does not understand the organizational environment where a system is used, the system is less likely to meet the real needs of the business and its users.
Does the system require changes to the work processes in the environment?
Does the system de-skill the users in an environment or cause them to change the way they work?
Does the system change the political power structure in an organization?
Major components of Socio-technical systems include:
Mainframes, workstations, peripheral, connecting networks. This is the classic meaning of technology. It is hard to imagine a socio-technical system without some hardware component. In our above examples, the hardware is the microcomputers and their connecting wires, hubs, routers, etc.
Operating systems, utilities, application programs, specialized code. It is getting increasingly hard to tell the difference between software and hardware, but we expect that software is likely to be an integral part of any socio-technical system. Software (and by implication, hardware too) often incorporates social rules and organizational procedures as part of its design (e.g. optimize these parameters, ask for these data, store the data in these formats, etc.). Thus, software can serve as a stand-in for some of the factors listed below, and the incorporation of social rules into the technology can make these rules harder to see and harder to change. In the examples above, much of the software is likely to change from the emergency room to the elementary school. The software that does not change (e.g. the operating system) may have been designed more with one socio-technical system in mind (e.g. UNIX was designed with an academic socio-technical system in mind). The re-use of this software in a different socio-technical system may cause problems of mismatch. Buildings also influence and embody social rules, and their design can affect the ways that a technology is used. The manager's office that is protected by a secretary's office is one example; the large office suite with no walls is another. The physical environment of the military supplier and the elementary school are likely to be quite different, and some security issues may be handled by this physical environment rather than by the technology. Moving a technology that assumes one physical environment into a different environment one may cause mismatch problems.
Individuals, groups, roles (support, training, management, line personnel, engineer, etc.), agencies. Note that we list here not just people (e.g. Mr. Jones) but roles (Mr. Jones, head of quality assurance), groups (Management staff in Quality Assurance) and agencies (The Department of Defense). In addition to his role as head of quality assurance, Mr. Jones may also have other roles (e.g. a teacher, a professional electrical engineer, etc.). The person in charge of the microcomputers in our example above may have very different roles in the different socio-technical systems, and these different roles will bring with them different responsibilities and ethical issues. Software and hardware designed assuming the kind of support one would find in a university environment may not match well with an elementary school or emergency room environment.
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| SOCIO TECHNICAL SYSTEM | MAJOR COMPONENTS OF SOCIO TECHNICAL SYSTEM |
Both official and actual, management models, reporting relationships, documentation requirements, and data flow, rules & norms. Procedures describe the way things are done in an organization (or at least the official line regarding how they ought to be done). Both the official rules and their actual implementation are important in understanding a socio-technical system. In addition, there are norms about how things are done that allow organizations to work. These norms may not be specified (indeed, it might be counter-productive to specify them). But those who understand them know how to, for instance, make complaints, get a questionable part passed, and find answers to technical questions. Procedures are prime candidates to be encoded in software design.
These also are procedures like those above, but they carry special societal sanctions if the violators are caught. They might be laws regarding the protection of privacy, or regulations about the testing of chips in military use. These societal laws and regulations might be in conflict with internal procedures and rules. For instance, some companies have implicit expectations that employees will share (and probably copy) commercial software. Obviously these illegal expectations cannot be made explicit, but they can be made known.
What data are collected, how they are archived, to whom they are made available, and the formats in which they are stored are all decisions that go into the design of a socio-technical system. Data archiving in an emergency room will be quite different from that in an insurance company, and will be subject to different ethical issues too.
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