'You are Here'. Exploring Social and Technical Environment of the Organization and Finding your Position in the Field

The methodological framework of my practitioner activity has been enriched with the requirement of the new standard ISO 9001:2015 that focuses on ‘Understanding the organization and its context’, ‘Understanding the needs and expectations of interested parties’ and ‘Planning actions to address risks and opportunities’. These new topics of the management model allowed me to increase and enlarge the exploration of the organizational environment and, in particular, to reflect on the role of organizational mapping. The described experiences deal with these new topics and with their consequences for my social and ethnographic approach. The first experience, which was previously presented, is the follow-up of the project in a co-operative organization that provides care services. The paper presents the positive results reached in IT system development with a socio-technical approach. The second experience is a collection of several cases that have a common background in terms of company identity, commitment and results. The lessons learned through the described experiences are presented, paying attention to the relationship between practitioner and his/her customer with reference to the topics of an ethnographic approach. Some questions are posed for transferring the methodological framework to less experienced practitioners.