Socio-technical Systems Thinking for Higher Education

ANANDHI VIVEKANANDAN DHUKARAM

Agenda Failures

Socio-technical Systems Thinking

Education Provision

Malaria

Mosquito nets

Social Failure The nets are difficult to obtain.

It’s critical that the people designing a program consider not only form and function, but distribution channels as well.

Without considering the whole system, the nets cannot be widely distributed, which makes the eradication of malaria impossible.

Medical Surgery

Hysteroscopy

Equipment

Organisational Failure

Doctor Nurses

Technical and Human Error

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsgyBqlFixo

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Everyday Technology

• Amazon, Wikipedia, and Facebook all see about 20 percent of their traffic from mobile-only users. • A whopping 46 percent of shoppers

reported they exclusively use their mobile device to conduct pre-purchase research for local products and services.• 68% of UK’s biggest publication

websites do not have effective mobile display.

$3.99 app Instant Blood Pressure, one of the top 10 “paid”

Everyday Technology - “For entertainment purposes only”.

$0.99 Measure your heart rate and breathing rate

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Healthcare Complexity

The Swiss cheese model of accident causation illustrates that, although many layers of defense lie between hazards and accidents, there are flaws in each layer that, if aligned, can allow the accident to occur.

Sociotechnical Systems

• Technology subsystems and components

And

• Societal, political, economic, organisational features impact

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Education Complexity Overview

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From sociotechnical perspective, it is impossible to separate the organisational or social issues from the technical issues.

Instead the organisation and the technology are interwoven to form a sociotechnical system. Where traditional requirements analysis focuses on what the technology should do (i.e. in terms of its functionality), sociotechnical analysis looks at how the technology will be incorporated into work activities.

This type of analysis is based on the observation that implementing a successful technology requires a thorough understanding of the organisational context, such as the organisation’s structure, work, employees, students needs and demand.

Socio-technical Systems Thinking

Thank You Anandhi.vivek@gmail.com