Page 285 -

268 Chapter 10 Sociotechnical systems

Organizational factors from the system’s environment that may affect the require-
ments, design, and operation of a sociotechnical system include:

1. Process changes The system may require changes to the work processes in the
environment. If so, training will certainly be required. If changes are significant,
or if they involve people losing their jobs, there is a danger that the users will
resist the introduction of the system.
2. Job changes New systems may de-skill the users in an environment or cause
them to change the way they work. If so, users may actively resist the
introduction of the system into the organization. Designs that involve managers
having to change their way of working to fit a new computer system are often
resented. The managers may feel that their status in the organization is being
reduced by the system.
3. Organizational changes The system may change the political power structure in
an organization. For example, if an organization is dependent on a complex sys-
tem, those who control access to that system have a great deal of political power.

Sociotechnical systems have three characteristics that are particularly important
when considering security and dependability:

1. They have emergent properties that are properties of the system as a whole,
rather than associated with individual parts of the system. Emergent properties
depend on both the system components and the relationships between them.
Given this complexity, the emergent properties can only be evaluated once the
system has been assembled. Security and dependability are emergent system
properties.
2. They are often nondeterministic. This means that when presented with a specific
input, they may not always produce the same output. The system’s behavior
depends on the human operators and people do not always react in the same
way. Furthermore, use of the system may create new relationships between the
system components and hence change its emergent behavior. System faults and
failures may therefore be transient, and people may disagree about whether or
not a failure has actually occurred.

3. The extent to which the system supports organizational objectives does not just
depend on the system itself. It also depends on the stability of these objectives,
the relationships, and conflicts between organizational objectives and how peo-
ple in the organization interpret these objectives. New management may reinter-
pret the organizational objectives that a system was designed to support so that
a ‘successful’ system may then be seen as a ‘failure’.

Sociotechnical considerations are often critical in determining whether or not a
system has successfully met its objectives. Unfortunately, taking these into account
is very difficult for engineers who have little experience of social or cultural studies.