The purpose of this paper is to argue for an integration of cognitive and socio-technical approaches to assessing the impact of health information systems. Historically, health informatics research has examined the cognitive and socio-technical aspects of health information systems separately. In this paper we argue that evaluations of health information systems should consider aspects related ...

By its very nature education aims to change learners’ knowledge and this inevitably has an impact on the learners’ world views. This paper explores the dilemmas facing Information Systems (IS) educators with respect to their role in the process of changing learners’ conceptual views of IS. IS as an academic discipline has moved from a ‘technical’ to a ‘socio-technical’ domain, but IS practition...

Society is demanding larger and more complex information systems to support increasingly complex and critical organisational work. Whilst troubleshooting socio-technical issues in small-to-medium scale situations may be achievable using approaches such as ethnography, troubleshooting enterprise scale situations is an open research question because of the overwhelming number of socio-technical e...

.................................................................................................................iv Contents...................................................................................................................v 1. Thesis Overview..................................................................................................1 1.1 Introduction.....................

Meta-design of socio-technical systems is an approach which complies with the need of integrating two different types of structures and processes: technical systems which are engineered to provide anticipatable and reliable interactions between users and systems, and social systems which are contingent in their interactions and a subject of evolution. Meta-design is focused on objectives, techn...

Attacks on systems and organisations increasingly exploit human actors, for example through social engineering. This non-technical aspect of attacks complicates their formal treatment and automatic identification. Formalisation of human behaviour is difficult at best, and attacks on socio-technical systems are still mostly identified through brainstorming of experts. In this work we discuss sev...

The paper examines how organizations and people are attached to the existing technologies. Doing so, we propose a socio-technical attachment perspective that helps us unpack different types of attachment between organizations and technologies. Based on an exploratory case study of an unsuccessful technology replacement process, we identify nine types of socio-technical attachments between the o...

It is widely acknowledged that adopting a socio-technical approach to system development leads to systems that are more acceptable to end users and deliver better value to stakeholders. Despite this, such approaches are not widely practised. We analyse the reasons for this, highlighting some of the problems with the better known socio-technical design methods. Based on this analysis we propose ...