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TopIntroduction: The Socio-Technical Legacy
In this paper we start reconsidering the importance – and surprising freshness – of three principles that are related to the core of the socio-technical theory: openness, underspecification, and interdependence. We focus on these three aspects as they appear to be even more suitable than in the past to effectively and positively inform the design of IT artifacts and IS artifacts in organizational settings. This is mainly for the current availability and affordability of more mature, stable and usable interactional technologies, as well as for a more receptive culture.
In arguing about the importance of these principles, we will focus on the technical component of the socio-technical systems that we above denoted as either IT artifacts or IS artifacts. More precisely, here we consider IT artifacts all of the single software applications that constitute an Information System (IS) “includ[ing] not only instantiations [of] the IT artifact but also the constructs, models, and methods applied in the development and use of information systems, [and instead excluding] people or elements of organizations [and] the process by which such artifacts evolve over time” (Hevner et al. 2004, p. 82). On the other hand, after Watson et al. (2012) we consider the IS artifact as a complex socio-technical system that includes “integrated and cooperating set of people, processes, software, and information technologies [that] support individual, organizational, or societal goals” (Watson et al. 2010).
The main aim of this paper is to argue the need to bring the concepts of openness, underspecification, and interdependence more concretely into the technological dimension of socio-technical design, and hence advocate for their application as design-oriented principles that underpin a novel approach to the implementation of IT and IS artifacts. In what follows we introduce our interpretation of these known principles.