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 the two. While analysing management problems of how best to get 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. security threats, market changes and , 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.
The main purpose of the workshop is to arrange discussions on using a socio-technical perspective in IS development, the long term goal being to make this workshop a meeting place for the community of IS researchers and practitioners interested in the sociotechnical approach. These workshop proceedings are a continuation from last year’s attempt to set a broad platform for discussion and debate on the benefits and problems of viewing information systems as socio-technical artefacts.
There were 18 submissions of various kinds - idea and research papers, experience reports, position papers, posters and multimedia presentations. Each submission was reviewed by at least 2, program committee members. The committee decided to accept 16 papers; in addition some papers were reclassified, e.g. from a research paper to a position paper.
As the result, the final proceedings consists of 7 position papers, 3 idea and research papers, 3 experience reports and 3 posters, one of which included a multimedia presentation. The topics cover various application domains where a socio-technical perspective can be used, such as security, production, storage, healthcare, etc. The program also included one invited talk, which also has been included in the proceedings. The invited talk was devoted to applying to socio-technical systems two important system theoretical concepts: autopoiesis and homeostasis.
The STPIS workshop has a tradition to devote half time to papers presentation and half time to collaborative work. Collaborative sessions at STPIS'19 were 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 was used in the exercise is included in the proceedings.
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 ECIS 2019 organizers for their support in organizing the fifth STPIS workshop.
June 25, 2019 STPIS’19 organizers
Stewart Kowalski
Peter Bednar Alexander Nolte
Ilia Bider ©Copyright held by the author(s)
Program Committee
Steven Alter University of San Francisco, US Peter Bednar University of Portsmouth, UK Ilia Bider Stockholm University, Sweden Federico Cabitza Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy Umberto Fiaccadori Lund University, Sweden Simon Foley Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway Thomas Herrmann University of Bochum, Germany Paul Johannesson Stockholm University, Sweden Stewart Kowalski Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway Alexander Nolte University of Tartu, Estonia Gil Regev Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland Lars Taxén Linköping university, Sweden