Socio-Technical Systems in ICT: A Comprehensive Survey

Socio-technical systems research aims to optimize two of the most important parts of the organization, the social network, and the technological network. The field is highly multi-disciplinary, and covers a host of issues, ranging from the management of complex systems, teams and work groups, interactions, and cognitive factors. Many approaches in the literature have adopted aspects of the socio-technical ideas, leading to four general perspectives. Depending on the view of the organization, solutions proposed are either those of the abstract organizational scientist, the social scientist, the technologist/engineer, or the complex systems engineer. This work surveys the field with these perspectives in mind, and highlights literature exploring such systems.