A Socio-Technical Perspective on the Digital Era: The Lowlands view

Given growing global competition, organisations face the dual challenge of creating workplaces that are, on the one hand, more productive, agile, and innovative, and on the other hand, healthy places to work.At the same time, we are facing a digital revolution with profound consequences in work and daily life. Digital technologies have potential opportunities, but also constraints. To make the transformation successful joint optimise of social and technical systems is necessary. The sociotechnical systems design theory (STS-D) and practice have focused the last 70 years on this challenge. Over the years, different STS lenses have developed like participative design (North America and Australia), democratic dialogue (Scandinavia) and organisation design (the Netherlands and Belgium, the Lowlands). All have in common the aim of designing modern organisations that are humane, productive, agile and innovative. Also, digital technology has developed over the years: from digitisation to digitalisation, and lately into digital transformation affecting societies, organisations and humans. With this article we take the Lowlands STS-D theory as perspective and we discover how this theory, especially the design sequence, should be adjusted to apply successful digital technology. First, we zoom in on digital technologies and its opportunities. Second, we zoom in on the STS-D Lowlands design theory its principles and organisational design sequence. The original design sequence requires adjustment from a digital technology perspective. We propose a combined approach from a digital-technical and social perspective. We end with new routines for designing modern 21stcentury organisations that facilitate organisational and digital experts to jointly optimise both perspectives in practice.

Digital Sociotechnical System Design

Digital platforms increasingly are dictating how work is carried out, breaking down boundaries between companies, geographies, customers, and other stakeholders and participants, and determining who will benefit from advancing technology. Existing organization design frameworks do not adequately address the new reality where both the technical and social elements of the full ecosystem need to be designed. Work is no longer carried out within a bounded organization, and individual organizations can no longer be the focus of design. Building on both the traditional sociotechnical systems framework and strategic organization design frameworks, we propose a digital sociotechnical systems design approach. It involves multiple stakeholders and participants in codesigning the digital system and the social system at the ecosystem level. A case example from health care is described and discussed.

Sociotechnical Aspects of Policy Simulation

Political decision-making is implemented in the framework of a classic sociotechnical system where respect has to be shown for both technical and social aspects. The development of suitable support tools for the previously mentioned requirements is rather complicated because a fundamentally important factor is product functionality and algorithm conformity to objective requirements (e.g. political decision quality assurance). Traditional design methods mainly focus on the quality of the system design process. They do ensure the quality of the decision-making process but not the decision quality itself. The inclusion of simulation in the system development process permits face validation for the decision-making algorithms of the goal system. This substantially improves acceptance and sustainability indices for the developed political decisions support system. The chapter deals with sociotechnical systems design peculiarities, emphasizing the role of simulation and social factors in the designing of policy decision-making support systems.