Pros And Cons Of Sociotechnical Systems

Over the decades it has become evident that one of the most important ways to facilitate effective organization redesign through technology advancement in organizations is through the use of information technology (IT) as an enabler of change. In fact, some have been willing to go beyond that by saying that IT is not only a key enabler of change, but also an initiator and a facilitator (Hammer, 1990; Chan, 2000). However, while IT played a significant role in changes in the nature of work responsibilities in organizations, the results achieved over the years appear to be more often than not to be slightly incremental and linear in nature. In other words the momentum of traditional business practices developed over the years overshadowed any

For example, productivity that has been achieved from computers is really a function of their combination with new business processes and new types of skills that go with them versus the fact that they are readily available for various applications (Friedman, 2005). However technological interactions has its pros and cons. Sociotechnical systems (STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society's complex infrastructures and human behaviour. In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined by Eric Trist, Ken Bamforth and Fred Emery, World War II era, based on their work with workers in English coal mines at the Tavistock Institute in London (Long, 2013) Sociotechnical systems pertains to theory regarding the social aspects of people and society and technical aspects of organizational structure and

This option might be called the strategy of 'simple organisations and complex jobs'". This all contributes to a number of unique advantages. Firstly is the issue of "human redundancy (Clark, 2005) in which "groups of this kind were free to set their own targets, so that aspiration levels with respect to production could be adjusted to the age and stamina of the individuals concerned (Bamforth, 1951) Human redundancy speaks towards the flexibility, ubiquity and pervasiveness of resources within NEC. The second issue is that of complexity. Complexity lies at the heart of many organisational contexts (there are numerous organizational paradigms that struggle to cope with it (Bamforth, 1951) could have been writing about these with the following passage: "A very large variety of unfavourable and changing environmental conditions is encountered ... many of which are impossible to predict. Others, though predictable, are impossible to alter (Bamforth,