Systems Design with the Socio-Technical Walkthrough

Socio-technical systems integrate technical and organizational structures and are related to various stakeholders and their perspectives. The design of socio-technical systems has to support this integration and to take the differing perspectives into account. To support this goal, the design concepts have to be represented with appropriate documentation methods, which combine formal and informal aspects. Communication processes have to be facilitated which systematically refer to these kinds of documentation. Therefore a socio-technical, semi-structured modeling method (SeeMe) is introduced. It represents socio-technical concepts with diagrams which can be developed, evaluated and improved by the socio-technical walkthrough (STWT). This facilitation method—together with a corresponding software-tool—has proven to be suitable for socio-technical design in complex, practical projects.

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