CONCLUSIONES FINALES.

This account gives reasons to be encouraged that we have moved some way towards the design of the kind of systems Niels Bjørn-Andersen envisaged in his paper of 1994. But the acid test is what is happening in the everyday development of IT systems. What has been the overall impact of these and other developments on the way in which systems are being designed and implemented? I recently undertook a review of surveys of IT design practice primarily in the UK (Eason, 2001) that included studies by Hornby et al. (1992), Smith and Dunckley (1995), Heinbokel et al. (1996) and Docherty and King (1998). In total these studies reviewed over 300 cases of systems design. The authors used a variety of survey methods and as a result it is difficult to make a formal comparison of their results. However, they were all concerned with the extent to which human and organizational issues were on the systems agenda and, if so, how they were handled.

Table 9.1 is an impressionistic scorecard based on these surveys to assess the movement towards more user-centred practices in user

organizations. The ten practices listed on the scorecard are those that are commonly recommended by advocates of the user-centred design of socio-technical systems (Eason, 1993). There are, of course, case studies in the UK where all of these characteristics of user-centred design have been systematically pursued. The work of Enid Mumford (Mumford, 1987) in the development of the ETHICS methodology has, for example, provided us with a number of examples of socio-technical systems design in practice. However, the judgements in Table 9.1 are assessments of the main methods used in the everyday practice of systems designers as found in the surveys.

These surveys show that normal practice includes much that is user- centred and suggests there has been considerable movement in this direction in the past 20 years. There is certainly more attention being paid to interface design and usability evaluation of the new technical system although in many cases we might question the adequacy of the practices being adopted (hence the judgement ‘common but!’). Most systems that are introduced into organizations now involve some form of user participation although as Hornby and Clegg (1992) have found users rarely seem to be able to make good use of these opportunities. What seems to be largely missing from these developments is the broader organizational agenda; the goal is still to design a technical system rather than a socio-technical system. User participation seems better suited to the evaluation of technical system prototypes, for Table 9.1: A scorecard for user-centred design

Characteristics of user-centred design Score card 1 Rare 2 To some degree 3 Common but! 4 Common Systems integration agenda ✔

User/stakeholder engagement ✔ Iterative/evolving development ✔ User requirements analysis ✔

Usability design ✔ Socio-technical systems design ✔

Formative evaluation – usability ✔ Formative evaluation – acceptability ✔

Change management/implementation ✔ Summative evaluation ✔

Are ‘human factors’ human re-visited 129 example, than it does to job design or organizational design. It seems that, despite the overwhelming evidence that social and organizational changes are inevitable concomitants of technical change, there is still little integrated systems development.

A number of explanations have been offered for this phenomenon. The first is that, whilst there is some movement towards a user-centred approach and towards user participation, the economic and technical priorities of management and systems providers are still dominant. Frequently the management agenda is to introduce a new technical system rather than to create a new socio-technical system. The ‘management of change’ comes after the technical system has been designed and when it is about to be delivered. The focus of the user- centred design is on the creation of a technical system that supports user tasks and is usable. In other words the presumptions of management and the contribution of the HCI community are mutually compatible and support user-centredness in the design of technical systems. There is little about, for example, job design and work organization because they are not perceived as major issues.

It has been argued that many organizational outcomes can be attributed to the operation of the power structure in an organization. According to this argument the senior management, as the investors in the technology, set cost cutting goals, for example, as the rationale for the system development and as a result they expect to see a loss of jobs and related organizational changes. System implementation may then run into difficulties because this is not in the interests of the user community who did not have a voice in system planning but can resist implementation. While there is evidence to support this argument and unequal power distribution among stakeholders in systems development is undoubtedly an important factor, there is also a lot of evidence that many organizational outcomes are unplanned and unintended by any stakeholder, including senior management. They are the result of an inadequate appreciation that the technical system being constructed has far-reaching implications for the socio-technical work system of which it is intended to form a part. Neither the technical staff nor the senior management that commission the work see any reason to do more than plan a technical system and, as a result, social system changes occur by happenstance rather than planning.

In some instances, such as the design of call centres or the ‘outsourcing’ of significant amounts of work, it is possible that the user management has an agenda for organizational change upon which they would not welcome user participation. However, in my experience, user management often do not see organizational change as necessary or desirable. I once spent a considerable amount of time trying to get a senior partner in a legal firm to understand the organizational implications and opportunities of introducing a networked text

processing and file management system (Eason, 1997). He insisted they were very happy with their organizational structure, did not wish to make job cuts and intended to keep everything the same; the technical system would make them more effective and efficient and enable them to provide a more professional service to their clients. In the event, after the technical system was implemented, the distribution of work between lawyers, secretaries and support staff had been fundamentally changed and they had to rethink secretarial responsibilities and reorganize their support staff. They found the organizational implications in the end and made organizational changes but only as a retrofit to a predetermined technical system and only after considerable role confusion and stress had been created among the staff of the organization.

Even when organizational change is on the agenda and the potential stakeholders are given the opportunity to contribute there is a great deal of evidence that the process is rarely effective. Users participating in such processes meet many problems; they may have limited time and opportunity to make their contribution, they may be confused by the technical nature of much of the debate and, if the systems team is working to a tight budget and timescale, they may experience pressure to accept system proposals quickly (Heinbokel et al., 1996).

I draw three conclusions about the current state of play in UK IT systems design practice. First, there are now more opportunities for people to play a significant role in the creation of the work organizations in which they will play a part. Second, these opportunities are mostly concerned with the design of more usable IT systems. Third, when people do have the opportunity to play a fuller role in the development of the socio-technical systems, they often struggle and the systems that result are not necessarily in the form envisaged in the Scandinavian Model of the Office. The focus of much of my work in systems development in recent years has, as a result, been attempts to find ways of empowering all of the stakeholders in their efforts to create integrated socio-technical systems within which they will want to work.