Importance of socio-technical perspective in research and practice A socio-technical perspective sees an organization as an emergent whole of multiple systems view - in this perspective a multiplicity of emergent combinations of what may appear as two systems is a key feature - a social system and a technical system as one indivisible whole. The real pattern of behaviour in the organization is determined by the interaction of two. While analysing management problems of getting things done by people, adequate consideration should be given to technology as well as informal and formal interactions of people. Despite that a socio-technical perspective has been around for over a half century, it is often forgotten in the IS discourse today. Consequently, many “new approaches” appear to reflect on IS systems problems, such as modern IT systems poorly adjusted to the external or/and internal environment (e.g. market, organizational culture) of organizations in which they are (to be) deployed. We strongly believe that it is high time the social-technical perspective took its proper place in IS research, practice and teaching.
Proceedings of STPIS ’16 (McEvoy & Kowalski). The fourth paper suggests a new way of modeling business processes based on the idea that each process is aimed at maintaining a homeostasis, and demonstrates practical usefulness of the approach (Rychkova & Regev).
We have two position papers this year. The first paper discusses transferring principles of interactive systems design to design of socio-technical systems (Herrmann, et al.). The second paper discusses the concept of change of a business process ecosystem (Dimitre & Kirikova).
Two poster will also be presented at the workshop. The first one discusses interoperability from the socio-technical perspective (Ashra, et al.). The second poster suggests using a socio-technical perspective in cyber security education (Zoto, et al.).
The STPIS workshop has a tradition to devote half time to papers presentation and half time to collaborative work. Collaborative sessions at STPIS'18 will be devoted to work in groups on a business case, each group producing a solution based on a sociotechnical systems approach of their choice. A short presentation of the business case that will be used is presented in Appendix 1.
The organizers are grateful to the members of Program Committee for their excellent work of reviewing submitted papers in short time. We are also thankful to EasyChair for providing us with a tool to manage the workshop free of charge. We are also much obliged to the CAISE'18 organizers for their support in organizing the third STPIS workshop.
May 25, 2018
©Copyright held by the author(s) ii Program Committee
Steven Alter Peter Bednar Ilia Bider Federico Cabitza Umberto Fiaccadori Stewart Kowalski Angela Locoro Alexander Nolte Athanasios Paraskelidis Gil Regev
University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom