A Model for Socio-Technical Systems

A Model for Socio-Technical Systems

Introduction

Information systems is the domain that is considered to be among the ones that have been developed extensively in the recent past. They have evolved significantly over time and are now playing a significant part in a number of areas in the modern world. They have greatly simplified everyday tasks, especially offices and businesses are making the most of it.

Information systems are a combination of software, hardware infrastructure, users and the software that runs them. Furthermore, they are demarcated by properly marked boundaries. There are a number of different types of information systems including include office information systems, transaction processing systems, management information systems, decision support systems, process control system, expert systems and integrated information systems. All these systems have become quite common in the present world. One of these systems, i.e. socio-technical systems has been enhanced greatly with time. They are now deployed in a number of areas of application as per requirement.

Socio-technical systems in the domain of organizational development is an approach that is taken in order to analyze the organizational design that is very much sophisticated that recognizes the interaction between the humans and the technology that is in use at their workplace. In simpler words, it refers to the relationship that exists between the social and technical or technological aspects of an organization (Whitworth & Ahmed, 2013).

It is based on two basic principles. The first one is that the interaction taking place between social and technical factors provides the opportunities enabling successful performance of the organization. The second one is that optimizing a single aspect may lead to undesirable effects. This suggests that socio-technical systems are all about joint development and optimization of both the aspects.

Discussion

Like every system, all information systems are based on some model and decision support systems are no exception. All the systems face changes in a continuous manner and therefore their developers need to be ready and up to the mark to cope up with those challenges. With the passage of time, a system may change due to some factors. As a result, proper arrangements need to be in place to modify the system to adapt to the changes.

It is possible that a system proves to be very helpful to its users. On the other hand, it is also possible that the system associates a number of problems and therefore is not useful for the users to the extent it is tended to (LaRue et.al, 2004).

One of the models used for defining the socio-technical interface systems is the Model for Assessing Adaptive Effectiveness (MAAE). Models play a pivotal role in defining and describing the systems. It is so because the aspect of wholeness of the model compels one to view the system form the top so as to establish a big and clear picture of the whole system of the organization. But it is also factual that establishing such a view is quite ...