Socio-technical design is an established technique in the information system development repertoire with a strong provenance in the Mumford’s work on ETHICS and the participatory design tradition in Scandinavia. Although there has been wide acceptance of the need for socio-technical design in the academic community (for example, socio-technical design has been adopted as a core perspective in t...

Information Systems (IS) are specified as complex socio-technical systems that display dynamic and emergent behaviors. Simulation-based studies provide a useful tool for analyzing such systems; however, the current presence and impact of simulation-based IS studies is limited. The socio-technical interactions and inherent dynamics of information systems make the development of IS simulations at...

In the morning interactive work session, a number of fundamental existential questions concerning socio-technical systems research as a discipline were raised. For example, the question of “Is truth about socio-technical systems discovered or created” was raised. As expected, different answers to the questions was discussed and debated. It was pointed out that since FACEBOOK, one of the world l...

Received: 23 July 2008 Revised: 1 October 2008 Accepted: 6 October 2008 Abstract We outline a Punctuated Socio-Technical Information System Change model. The model recognizes both incremental and punctuated socio-technical change in the context of information systems at multiple levels – the work system level, the building system level, and the organizational environment. It uses sociotechnical...

This research aims to develop indicators for assessing green interior design of new residential buildings in China, grounded in the socio-technical systems approach. The research was carried out through a critical literature review and two focus group studies. The results show that the boundaries of green interior design were identified with respect to three dimensions, namely performance, meth...

We present a socio-technical analysis of security of Hotspot and Hotspot 2.0. The analysis focuses is user-centric, and aim at understanding which user action can compromise security in presence of a attacker. We identify research questions about possible factors that may affect user’s security decisions, and propose experiments to answer them.

Socio-technical systems constitute a challenge for multiagent systems as they are complex scenarios in which human and artificial agents share information, interact and make decisions. For example, the design of an airport requires to interface information coming from automatic apparatuses as security cameras, conceptual information coming from agents, and normative information which agents’ be...

There are both technical and social issues regarding the design of sustainable scientific software. Scientists want continuously evolving systems that capture the most recent knowledge while developers and architects want sufficiently stable requirements to ensure correctness and efficiency. A sociotechnical ecosystem provides the environment in which these issues can be traded off.

In this paper, a model and an evaluation method are proposed expanding technology assessment model (TAM) to enable a comprehensive evaluation and selection of socio technical systems relevant in today’s Internet environment. The proposed evaluation model called WOSP is practical and easy to integrate in decision support system tools for comparing IT software involving socio-technical factors.