Exploring the socio-technical dimension of information system development: use cases and job satisfaction

Socio-technical design is an established technique in the information system development repertoire with a strong provenance in the Mumford’s work on ETHICS and the participatory design tradition in Scandinavia. Although there has been wide acceptance of the need for socio-technical design in the academic community (for example, socio-technical design has been adopted as a core perspective in the Multiview/WISDM methodology), there is little evidence that practitioners have adopted socio-technical methods. This paper reports from an action research project in which traditional software development methods, in particular the UML (unified modelling language) use case, were combined with a concern for job satisfaction. The outcomes of the intervention are presented together with reflections on the potential dangers and limitations of combining engineering rationality with a sociotechnical perspective.