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Socio-technical systems - there's more to performance than new technology

The Performance Technologies Group

Category: strategy | Author: Xi Liu and Craig Errey | Date: 19/02/2006

Summary


The Socio-technical systems approach (STS) provides significant insights into the complex dynamic of performance in an organisation.  The interrelationships between people and technology mean that it is not a matter of simply installing new technology to solve apparent performance problems.

STS is a diagnostic tool to uncover the causal chain of events that drives performance so that investment in technology is supported by changes in the surrounding organisational processes and people.  STS supports the alignment of people and technology and needs to be used in conjunction with user interface design and the IT Blueprint to ensure the right technology is put in place.

STS was developed in the 1960's by Eric Trist and prominent Australian psychologist Fred Emery at the Tavistock Institute.  Despite its beginnings from production lines and mining case studies, the approach is as much relevant today as it was over 40 years ago.  Read more about STS and Fred Emery.

What is socio-technical systems theory?


The Socio-technical Systems (STS) theory considers that every organisation is made up of people (the social system) using tools, techniques and knowledge (the technical system) to produce goods and services valued by customers (who are part of the organisation'external environment).

How well the social and technical systems are designed, with respect to another and with respect to the demands of the external system, determines to a large extent how effective the organisation will be.  The concept of the socio-technical system was established to emphasise the two-way relationship between people and machines.  Its role is to foster the program of shaping both the technical and the social conditions of work in such a way that efficiency and humanity would not contradict each other any longer.

 

Understanding your organisation, its performance and the use of technology

We often see management take the view that simply putting in a new piece of technology will solve the observed performance problems.  But performance is much more complicated than that.  There are many different reasons for why things are they way they are.  Using the STS framework as an analytical tool will help identify the root causes of performance.

Consider these examples:

A financial services institution uses several different applications to complete an end-to-end customer process.  You find that the sales team aren't cross-selling or giving leads to other parts of the organisation.

You take a closer look at the IT systems and discover there isn't a good leads management function available to them.  Your first reaction might be to build a better CRM application that manages leads in a more effective way.

However, the situation is more complex than this.  Because you didn't examine how people are working, you wouldn't have discovered that the performance management system does not include KPIs for the number and quality of leads.  It turns out that people are paid only on their own sales, not on helping others (i.e. on group sales performance).  Getting more leads requires a change to the performance management system.

 
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