User-Centered Systems Design: A Brief History - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 39

socio-technical systems using so-called socio-technical system design (STSD)
methods such as ETHICS (Effective Technical and Human Implementation of
Computer-based Systems; Mumford 1983 , 1995 ). In reality, these methods are more
like guiding philosophies than design methods that are usually associated with
systems engineering (Mumford 2006 ). In other words, the STSD methods tend to
provide a process and a set of guiding principles (e.g., Cherns 1987 ; Clegg 2000 )
rather than a set of detailed steps that have to be followed.
From its inception in the period immediately after World War II, by what is
now called The Tavistock Institute, until the present day, there have been several
attempts at applying the ideas of STSD, although these have not always been
successful (e.g., see Mumford 2006 for a critical review of the history of STSD
methods). Early work in STSD focused mostly on manufacturing and production
industries such as coal, textiles, and petrochemicals. The general aim was to
investigate the organization of work and to see whether it could be made more
humanistic, incorporating aspects such as the quality of working life. In other
words, the idea was a move away from the mechanistic view of work that is
usually associated with Taylor's principles of scientific management, which lar-
gely relied on the specialization of work and the division of labor.
The heyday of STSD was probably the 1970s. This was a time when there were
labor shortages, and companies were keen to use all means available to keep their
existing staff. This was also the period where more and more computer systems
were being introduced into the workplace. Apart from the usual cultural and social
reasons, companies could also see good business reasons for adopting socio-
technical ideas. As just one of many such examples, Digital Equipment Corpo-
ration (DEC) had a family of expert systems that were developed using STSD
(e.g., see Mumford and MacDonald 1989 ) to support the configuration and loca-
tion of DEC VAX computers that saved the company tens of millions of dollars a
year (Barker and O'Connor 1989 ).
There was a downturn in the use of STSD in the 1980s and 1990s as lean
production techniques and business process re-engineering approaches dominated
system development. STSD is, however, still widely advocated in the field of health
informatics for the development of health care applications (e.g., Whetton 2005 ).
Many medical systems are still never used because they introduce ways of working
that conflict with other aspects of the user's job, or they require changes to pro-
cedures that affect other people's responsibilities. By focusing on the underlying
work structure, STSD approaches facilitate the development of medical systems
that are acceptable to the users (Berg 1999 , 2001 ; Berg and Toussaint 2003 ).
Socio-technical ideas pervade a lot of thinking around information systems,
although they may not always be explicitly referred to as such (Avgerou et al.
2004 ). The ideas appear in areas such as participatory design methods, computer
supported cooperative work (CSCW), and ethnographic approaches to design.
Recently, Baxter and Sommerville ( 2011 ) have outlined the need for socio-tech-
nical systems engineering, which integrates the ideas that have been developed in
these different areas.