Social &Technical, Sociotechnical, Wicked & Tame

One recent comment to this blog pondered whether social systems are necessarily wicked, and technical systems are necessarily tame. The pithy answer would be, "no", but I'm more curious than that and have a few more questions to ponder in this regard.

There's an emerging science of socio-technical systems that addresses the interaction between people and technology directly. I've worked on a dozen or so "socio-technical" systems designs and implementations in my career (these are seldom short lived endeavors) and have observed the outcomes when the whole {socio-technical} package is not considered in planning. I recall an implementation of an engineering to manufacturing collaboration system I was the lead (technology) architect for, which did not address the "social" aspects of the system implementation directly.


To say that we "did not address" the social issues is an understatement. The social implications were deliberately avoided because:

1. 24 technical writers would be unemployed at the end of the project
2. Engineers would be responsible for their own documentation at the end of the project

In other words, the "collaboration system" was cost justified based on headcount reduction. The engineering team was not too excited about their new way of "collaborating through technology".

We crossed some wicked interaction design and integration challenges on the technical side with a clear vision of how we would be helping people to collaborate more effectively through technology. However, our beliefs about why we were implementing the system, and what its benefits would be were not aligned with our funders real, but unarticulated goals. Our funders did not understand that what they thought they would get (and, I think were promised by a consulting firm to remain anonymous here) was unlikely to be achieved in the manner they dreamed about.

We had wicked problems both socially and technically. We solved the technical problems. The social problems were intractable because they needs of the funders were not aligned with the people in the organization, and were not visible to the people designing the system.

My answer, then, stated in this story-like manner, is that both social and technical problems may be wicked (ill defined) ...but it is far easier to mislead or confuse a group of people regarding the social side of the equation than the technical side....

At this point in history, it is the failure to consider the whole "socio-technical system" that leads to the greatest number of challenges.

I suggest you consider these action items if you are endeavoring to design or implement socio-technical systems:

1. If you're in a meeting discussing collaboration (or workflow, or groupware or "socioal) software, and the only topic is related to the technology, beware.
2. If you're in the middle of implementing a collaboration system and people are not talking about what the goals of the system are, how it will affect the way people work, etc... be more ... ware... double beware
3. If you're fortunate enough to work with people who understand what ethnography is, and accept that it's as important to the successful implementation of a collaboration related technology as the technology itself... buy yourself a beer - You're in a good place, and beer is how we celebrate that kind of thing where I'm from!