Introduction to Socio Technical System
Socio technical system is a mixture of people and technology and much more. It acts as an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. This system will be able to carry out multiple complex computations and return the result into its environment. It illustrates the fundamental characteristics of the system.
Socio Technical System Components
Different components are mentioned below:
1. Hardware
It includes mainframes, workstations, peripheral, connecting networks. For example, consider a set of 10 microcomputers connected to by a network. These networked computers differ based on the circumstances. These networked computers are whether part of the emergency room, small public lab at university, computing lab of an elementary school, a risk analysis tool in an insurance form or part of military supplier testing manufactured parts. In this socio technical system, hardware is the microcomputer, connecting wires, hubs, routers, etc.
2. Software
Software is an integral part of any socio technical system. Software and hardware incorporate social rules and organizational procedures as part of their design: operating systems, utilities, application programs, specialized code. An operating system is the software that probably does not change is designed more with socio technical system in mind.
3. People
Individuals, groups, agencies. These different roles of a person in different socio technical system bring different responsibilities and ethical issues.
4. Physical Surrounding
The building also influences the social rules, and their design can effect the ways that technology is used. Moving technology from one physical environment to a different physical environment may cause mismatch problems.
5. Procedures
Both official and actual management models, reports relationship, documentation, data flow, rules and norms. It describes the way things are to be done in an organization. The rules and their actual implementation are important in understanding a socio technical system. Those who know the rules, for instance, know how to make complaints, get a questionnaire passed and how to find the answers to technical questions.
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6. Laws and Regulations
These procedures are the same as above, but they carry special societal sanction if the violators are caught. They are the laws regarding privacy protection or testing of chips in military use. These societal laws and regulations might conflict with each other. For example, some companies have expectations that employees will share commercial Software. Obviously, these illegal expectations cannot be made explicit, but they can be made aware of.
7. Data and Data Structures
Data is collected, how they are documented, to whom they are made available, and the format in which they are stored are all decisions of designing part of the socio technical system. Data archiving in an emergency room will differ from that in an insurance company and subject to different ethical issues.
Characteristics of Socio Technical System
- Socio technical system is often non-deterministic. This means there is no guarantee that they will always generate the same output for specific input. The system behavior depends on the human operators do not always react in the same way. Also, the use of the system may create a new relationship between components and hence change its emergent behavior.
- Socio technical systems have emergent properties that are properties of the system as a whole rather than associated with individual components of the system. Emergent properties depend on both system components and the relationship between them. Thus emergent properties can only be assessed once the system has been integrated.
- The extent to which the system support organizational objectives does not just depend on the system itself. It also depends on the stability of these objectives, the relationship and conflicts between them, and how they interpret these objectives.
Emergent System Properties
An emergent property is a result of the relationship between system components. They can only be assessed and measured once the components have been integrated into a system.
Types of emergent properties are as follows:
- Functional properties: Functional properties appear when all the components of a system work together to achieve some objective. For example, a bullock cart has the functional property as a transportation device once It has been assembled from its components like wheels, seating arrangement, OX pair, etc.
- Non-functional properties: Non-functional properties state the behavior of the system in its functional environment. For example, performance, reliability, portability and security. The reliability of the system depends on the reliability of system components and the relation between the components, but expected interaction can cause new types of failure. Security of the system is its ability to resist attacks. Some attacks may be such that which were not expected by the system designers and so may crush the built-in safeguards.
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