Tools to incorporate some psychological and organizational issues during the development of computer-based systems

Abstract

The organization, findings and outcomes of a joint industrial/academic project are described. The principal goal of the project was to develop and test some tools through which people involved in system development can incorporate explicit consideration of certain key psychological and organizational issues. Five tools developed for this purpose are outlined. These are concerned with the design of work organization, job design, the allocation of tasks between humans and computers, usability and task analysis. The use of the tools is described in a 'live' system development project in a large company. The authors briefly review the extent to which these tools meet a set of pre-specified requirements, compare their approach with those of Mumford (1986) and Lim et al. (1992), and make explicit what claims they are making of these tools.

Can job redesign interventions influence a broad range of employee outcomes by changing multiple job characteristics? A quasi-experimental study.

“…In this study, we conducted a quasi-experimental participative job redesign based on a scenarios planning method (Axtell, Pepper, Clegg, Wall, & Gardner, 2001;Clegg et al, 1996) that had proven successful in another call centre job redesign initiative (Holman et al, 2009). …”

An investigation of the factors affecting the successful treatment of organisational issues in systems development projects

“…For example, in the past twenty years a number of specific methods, such as: ETHICS (Mumford 1986), Multiview (Avison & WoodHarper, 1990) and SSM (Checkland, 1981), all of which have a stronger human and organisational orientation than traditional systems development methodologies, have been introduced. Alternative approaches to the treatment of organisational issues include: the modification of structured methods to take account of human factors (Lim et al, 1992); the adoption of a suite of tools to be used in conjunction with traditional methods (Clegg et al, 1996); the encouragement of user participation (Hornby et al, 1992) and participative design methods (Mumford, 1997). Unfortunately, despite these initiatives, the systems development process is still primarily a technology driven process (Clegg et al, 1997a;Poulymenako and Holmes, 1996).…”

The impact of inadequacies in the treatment of organizational issues on information systems development projects

“…Researchers, such as Clegg et al [7], have attempted to develop tools and techniques to aid in the treatment of specific organizational issues.…”