ABSTRACT
It is widely accepted that socio-technical approaches to system development lead to systems that are more acceptable to their users and deliver better value to stakeholders. These approaches have had limited impact, however, so we have proposed the creation of the broader field of socio-technical systems engineering (STSE) which builds on the (largely independent) research of groups investigating work design, information systems, computer-supported cooperative work, and cognitive systems engineering. We illustrate the ideas underpinning STSE using examples from large projects we have worked during the past decade. The first shows how we addressed dependability issues in neonatal intensive care using cognitive task analysis, the second describes responsibility modeling, a method we developed for analyzing vulnerabilities in socio-technical systems, and the third describes how we intend to apply our ideas to analyze the use of cloud computing.
