4.3.2 Analysis of Cognitive Work for Large‐Scale Socio‐Technical Systems

Large-scale socio-technical systems are cognitive systems and function as such through the individual and collaborative cognitive work of the humans in the system. As major systems have become more information intensive and more distributed, the difficulty of addressing cognitive challenges has become a troubling area for systems acquisition. The discipline of cognitive systems engineering has methods and tools that can be brought to bear on this problem. In this paper I outline two analytic frameworks that have been developed within cognitive systems engineering for design of cognitive work and illustrate how their tools and methods can be deployed to develop the cognitive content of products currently required by the US defense acquisition management framework. The strategy I propose for development of cognitively-relevant functionality of large-scale systems is to replace inadequate methods currently in use with the more effective and efficient methods from cognitive systems engineering.