Information Technology and Organizational Change

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Summary: A seminal work in information systems design and development
Review: In the 1940s, automation in the Welsh coal mines resulted in a decrease, not an increase, in productivity. In the 1950s General Motors opened a new, highly-automated automobile plant that couldn't turn out any cars because the workers wouldn't show up to work in it. These two cases were among the earliest applications of sociotechnical systems analysis: the concept that the most effective work system is not that with the most efficient technical systems but that with the best balance of the technical and the social systems that results in the greatest actual productivity. The three key principles of socio-tech are:

1. Introduction of technology changes the entire work system. Therefore you should design the new work system first and then design the technology to accomplish the desired change.

2. Technology is only cost effective if it fundamentally changes the work sytem to reduce non-value-added work and increase the productivity of the outcomes of the organization, not just production of the artifacts of how things were done before.

3. Technically efficient tools are not the goal; we are after a total work system that enables productive workers.

Information Technology and Organisational Change by British author Ken Eason (hence the British spelling of "organisational") is a seminal work in applying the concepts of sociotechnical systems analysis to information systems. He starts with an analysis of the information age, and discusses the fact that, unlike the agriculture age and the industrial age, the information age is being shaped by millions of individual system design decisions, and that most of these decisions are being made based on local efficiency with little thought to the age that is being created. He prescribes sociotechnical analysis as one remedy for this tendency.

This is followed with a review of the ways in which information systems might add value to an organization, and one by one shows how the potential is difficult to realize, leaving us with only tho! se uses of information technology that create fundamental change in the entire work system as being worth the investment of time, talent, and money. In this he echoes strongly Michael Hammer's work showing business-intensive systems as being where 80% or more of our systems development efforts should go. A review of traditional, structured, participative, and end-used design and development methods helps the project sponsor to pick the design method best suited to the organisational change s/he desires.

The remaining eight chapters of this book work through designing the process, forming the design team, and the steps of doing sociotechnical design ,development, and implementation. In using this book with graduate-level classes in business information systems, it is generally conceded that the language and the newness of ideas make it a difficult book to read, but that the material covered make it worth the effort.