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What is a Socio-Technical System? (STS)
A socio-technical system (=STS) is a tool to help a business anticipate and successfully resolve interdisciplinary business problems. "Interdisciplinary business problems" refer to problems where financial values are intertwined with technical, ethical, social, political, and cultural values. (Reference: Chuck Huff, Good Computing: A Virtue Approach to Computer Ethics, draft manuscript for Jones and Bartlett Publishers)
Some Things to Know About STSs
- Socio-Technical systems provide a tool to uncover the different environments in which business activity takes place and to articulate how these constrain and enable different business practices.
- A STS can be divided into different components such as hardware software, physical surroundings, peo ple/groups/roles, procedures, laws/statutes/regulations, and information systems. Other components include the natural environment, markets, and political systems.
- But while different components can be distinguished, these are, in the final analysis, inseparable. Socio-Technical Systems are first and foremost systems: their components are interrelated and interact so that a change in one often produces changes that reverberate through the system.
- Socio-Technical systems embody moral values such as justice, responsibility, respect, trust, and integrity as well as non-moral values such as efficiency, satisfaction, productivity, effectiveness, and profitability. Often these values can be located in one or more of the system components. Often they conflict with one another causing the system as a whole to change.
- STSs change, and this change traces out a path or trajectory. The normative challenge here is to bring about and direct changes that place the STS on a value-positive trajectory. In the final analysis, we study STS to make sure that they change in a value-realizing direction.
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