ABSTRACT

The highly interconnected supply chains and public services ofmodern society pose significant challenges to ergonomists. Organisations aremoving away from delivering products, in the form of goods, towards providing through-life availability of an instantiated capability. Enabled by modern technology, product-service integration is seen as a way to increase competitiveness, and to expand and secure future business in an unstable economic climate (see e.g. Johnstone et al., 2008). But, in order to deliver capability suppliers must integrate many technical and organisational systems, both within and outside of their own organisation; some of which systems are new and some of which are mature. The result is an environment characterised as a Systems of Systems (SoS) (Jamshidi, 2009; Maier, 1998) in which a number of independently managed and disparate technical, organisational and/or business entities come together to provide capability and where none of these entities are able to provide the capability acting alone.