Socio-technical design

The principles of socio-technical design are concerned with getting a balance between:

the strategic vision of the organization;
the technology and the tasks needed to provide the product or service;
the needs of the staff.

This school of thought stems from a systems view of organizations, based in the organism metaphor (see Senge in Chapter 3), and is a much more incremental, evolutionary approach. The approach is less widely used than BPR, and seems more cautious and humanistic than traditional BPR processes, which have a rather macho feel to them, advocating throwing everything out and starting again.

The underlying principles of socio-technical design are identified in Mumford and Beekman (1994). These principles were originally developed by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London in the late 1960s, but still appear to hold good today:

The principle of minimum critical specification: tell people what to do but not how to do it.
The principle of variance control: problems must be corrected as close to the point of origin as possible, and preferably by the group that caused them.
The principle of multiskilling: give individuals a range of tasks including some routine and some challenging.

The principle of boundary management: identify boundaries between groups or functions and ensure that these are well managed and that the people on them have the necessary information to pass the product smoothly to its next transformation stage.

The principle of information flow: information systems should be designed so that information goes directly to the place where action is to be taken, or to the source that originated it.

The principle of design and human values: an important objective of organizational design should be to provide a high quality of working life for employees, for instance to fulfil the need to feel the job leads to a desirable future.

The principle of incompletion: the need to recognize that design is an ongoing and iterative process.

Socio-technical design involves more forethought, planning and incremental change than BPR, which is faster, more risky and more exciting. As defined by the Tavistock Group, this process was facilitated by either a consultant or a manager, and followed the steps below. Some of these activities may look a bit quaint these days. When compared with BPR, the focus might appear rather ‘fluffy’ as much attention is given to the psychological needs of the workforce. See Figure 8.4.

Figure 8.4: The socio-technical design process
Source: Mumford and Beekman (1994)

Socio-technical design is still alive and well in some companies, but has been rather overtaken by the speed and promise of BPR. Although the incremental, developmental approach is seen to work well, it is often too slow for many environments where big results are sought quickly, without taking people off the job to do the research and take action.