Moving towards a holistic approach to design socio-technical systems

With increasing complexity holistic approaches for designing socio-technical systems gain importance. Such systems consist of interdependent human and machine agents that follow more or less pre-defined procedures and practices. As they are embedded in a given socio-cultural, political and economic environment, they are prone to various influences. However, many traditional development concepts do not consider the strong interdependencies and manifold aspects of the different system components. These approaches focus on one or few components or sub-systems in isolation to efficiently design e.g. a reliable information system, workflow system or database system. Yet, these sub-systems have to be integrated in a wider organisational environment, where they have to interact and co-operate with other sub-systems or humans. Here, a holistic design concept is put forward, where the different system components such as human and machine agents, formal rules and procedures, social work practices, organisational, political, and socio-cultural factors are analysed and designed in an integral way. Basic to the approach are: distributed cognition theory, scenario based analysis and design, integrated requirements engineering, and the SHEL model as concrete starting point for a systemic view.