Search

80% of IT projects are known to fail. Adopting a socio-technical approach will help them to succeed in the future. The socio-technical proposition is simply that any work system comprises both a social system (including the staff, their working practices, job roles, culture and goals) and a technical system (the tools and technologies that support and enable work processes). These elements together form a single system comprising interacting parts. The technical and the social elements need to be jointly designed (or redesigned) so that they are congruent and support one another in delivering a better service. Focusing on one aspect alone is likely to be sub-optimal and wastes money (Clegg, 2008). Thus projects that just focus on the IT will almost always fail to deliver the full benefits.

Information technology plays a pivotal role in New Labour’s modernization programme. Here we report findings from a 2 year ethnographic study of the impact and origin of one such system, the Integrated Children’s System, which has been deployed in statutory children’s social care. We show how the ICS, by attempting to micro-manage work through a rigid performance management regime, and a centrally prescribed practice model, has disrupted the professional task, engendering a range of unsafe practices and provoking a gathering storm of user resistance. We attribute these paradoxical outcomes to inherent flaws in the design of ICS, which derive from the history of its development and its embodiment of an audit-driven, inspectorial ideology. We conclude with some suggestions for user-centred design and policymaking, which have relevance not only for children’s social care but for the public services in general.

Information technology plays a pivotal role in New Labour’s modernization programme. Here we report findings from a 2 year ethnographic study of the impact and origin of one such system, the Integrated Children’s System, which has been deployed in statutory children’s social care. We show how the ICS, by attempting to micro-manage work through a rigid performance management regime, and a centrally prescribed practice model, has disrupted the professional task, engendering a range of unsafe practices and provoking a gathering storm of user resistance. We attribute these paradoxical outcomes to inherent flaws in the design of ICS, which derive from the history of its development and its embodiment of an audit-driven, inspectorial ideology. We conclude with some suggestions for user-centred design and policymaking, which have relevance not only for children’s social care but for the public services in general.

In this article, we lament the effects of practice-distant research and associated policy initiatives on contemporary children's services in England. In the last decade, as a result of high profile inquiries into non-accidental child deaths, statutory children's social care services in the UK have been subject to a wide-reaching 'modernization' programme. We studied decision-making in the high blame environment of local authority children's services. Our research sought to examine the relationship between performance management and the impact of anticipated blame within the decision-making practices of those providing, supervising and managing these services. We show that systems and technologies can be developed which both assist the users in their daily work and achieve desired organizational goals, but without an ethnographically informed, practice-near approach, unsafe work regimes and practices can ensue.

This paper describes a detailed ethnographic study of the design problems of a major national IT system in the UK- The Integrated Children’s System (ICS). The implementation of the ICS has disrupted social work practice and engendered growing professional resistance, prompting a fundamental review of its design. Marshall McLuhan’s concept of chiasmus is a central feature of our analysis of the vicissitudes of ICS. Chiasmus refers to the tendency of any system, when pushed too far, to produce unintended contradictory effects, and is an intrinsic feature of the behaviour of complex, socio-technical systems. The dysfunctions of the ICS provide a pertinent, large-scale example. The ICS constitutes an attempt, via technological means, to re-organize child welfare services in the UK. Whilst aimed at improving child safety, the ICS has had the opposite effect of increasing the potential for error. This chiasmus has been exposed through the multi-site ethnography reported here, which shows how rigidly designed processes, enforced by IT systems, force social work professionals into unsafe investigative and recording practices which increase the risk of errors. The paper ends by proposing an alternative approach to design, based on socio-technical precepts, emphasizing the principles of minimum critical specification, user-centeredness and local autonomy.

Given the important but largely unstudied role of contextual influences on the diffusion of innovations, theories and methodologies which take context into account are increasingly relevant. One such approach, the system of innovation approach (SIA), considers context as a network of organizations and groups involved in the production and diffusion of innovations. In addition to the focal innovation, these organizations and groups are influenced by other contexts, and so the further study of their diffusion settings extends the diffusion research agenda. To this end, we focus on a subset of the public programs involved in the diffusion of e-business innovations to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). E-business applications are complex innovations, and the need for outside assistance is especially significant for SMEs because they often lack the knowledge and resources to strategically adopt, modify, and use e-business applications. To understand how these programs influence e-business adoption, we used theories that examine the contexts around public program interventions in order to explain its form and outcome. The empirical findings suggest that many public programs fail to effectively deliver interventions because program personnel work in contexts that restrict their focus and ability to completely assess SME business needs.

Given the important but largely unstudied role of contextual influences on the diffusion of innovations, theories and methodologies which take context into account are increasingly relevant. One such approach, the system of innovation approach (SIA), considers context as a network of organizations and groups involved in the production and diffusion of innovations. In addition to the focal innovation, these organizations and groups are influenced by other contexts, and so the further study of their diffusion settings extends the diffusion research agenda. To this end, we focus on a subset of the public programs involved in the diffusion of e-business innovations to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). E-business applications are complex innovations, and the need for outside assistance is especially significant for SMEs because they often lack the knowledge and resources to strategically adopt, modify, and use e-business applications. To understand how these programs influence e-business adoption, we used theories that examine the contexts around public program interventions in order to explain its form and outcome. The empirical findings suggest that many public programs fail to effectively deliver interventions because program personnel work in contexts that restrict their focus and ability to completely assess SME business needs.