An analytic framework to assess organizational resilience

Background: Resilience Engineering is a paradigm for safety management that focuses on coping with complexity to achieve success, even considering several conflicting goals. Modern socio-technical systems have to be resilient to comply with the variability of everyday activities, the tight-coupled and underspecified nature of work and the nonlinear interactions among agents. At organizational level, resilience can be described as a combination of four cornerstones: monitoring, responding, learning and anticipating. Methods: Starting from these four categories, this paper aims at defining a semi-quantitative analytic framework to measure organizational resilience in complex socio-technical systems, combining the Resilience Analysis Grid (RAG) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Results: This paper presents an approach for defining resilience abilities of an organization, creating a structured domain-dependent framework to define a resilience profile at different levels of abstraction, to identify weaknesses and strengths of the system and thus potential actions to increase system’s adaptive capacity. An illustrative example in an anaesthesia department clarifies the outcomes of the approach. Conclusions: The outcome of the RAG, i.e. a weighted set of probing questions, can be used in different domains, as a support tool in a wider Safety-II oriented managerial action to bring safety management into the core business of the organization

Municipal transitions: The social, energy, and spatial dynamics of sociotechnical change in South Tyrol, Italy

With the aim of proposing recommendations on how to use social and territorial specificities as levers for wider achievement of climate and energy targets at local level, this research analyses territories as sociotechnical systems. Defining the territory as a sociotechnical system allows us to underline the interrelations between space, energy and society. Groups of municipalities in a region can be identified with respect to their potential production of renewable energy by means of well-known data-mining approaches. Similar municipalities linking together can share ideas and promote collaborations, supporting clever social planning in the transition towards a new energy system. The methodology is applied to the South Tyrol case study (Italy). Results show eight different spatially-based sociotechnical systems within the coherent cultural and institutional context of South Tyrol. In particular, this paper observes eight different systems in terms of (1) different renewable energy source preferences in semi-urban and rural contexts; (2) different links with other local planning, management, and policy needs; (3) different socio-demographic specificities of individuals and families; (4) presence of different kinds of stakeholders or of (5) different socio-spatial organizations based on land cover. Each energy system has its own specificities and potentialities, including social and spatial dimensions, that can address a more balanced, inclusive, equal, and accelerated energy transition at the local and translocal scale

Designing with the use of data for a better understanding of people and operating contexts in sociotechnical systems

The complex systems defined as ‘sociotechnical systems’ are made of software, hardware and people, somehow linked to the policy and a large number of stakeholders. They show complex dependencies and functional-based constraints. Over the last decades, the need to cope with the complexity took different forms, evolving in research activities and new disciplines. Systemic Design (SD) is an approach to manage the complexity that draws its origins into the General System Theories, cybernetics and generative science of the twentieth century, up to the recent attention towards systems thinking. Cyber-physical systems (CPSs), on the other hand, draws its origins from software and mechanical engineering, merging theory of cybernetics, mechatronics, design and process science. In CPS computing and communication are tightly coupled with the monitoring and control of entities in the physical world (Cheng and Atlee, 2008). The idea behind CPS is similar to the idea of the Internet of Things (IoT), with which it shares the same architecture. IoT is growing importance also in the design field. As design research by definition is intended to produce knowledge, this knowledge can be acquired by merging different methods, e.g. qualitative and quantitative. The data collected and made available from IoT technologies quantifies aspects that were not measurable before, providing content for other research activities such as ethnographic research and participatory activities. The designer could query some physical object and obtain useful data for the design. In this paper, we seek to address the design process in the era of the IoT, exploring the use of data in the early design stages as a means to investigate the application domain and stakeholders’ interaction with products

Resilience engineering for sociotechnical safety management

Modern societies call for a reconsideration of risk and safety, in light of the increasing complexity of human-made systems. Technological artefacts, and the respective role of humans, as well as the organizational contexts in which they operate, dramatically changed in the last decades with an even more severe transformation expected in the future. Rooted in human factors, ergonomics, cognitive engineering, systems thinking and complexity theory, the discipline of resilience engineering proposes innovative approaches for safety challenges imposed by the dynamic, uncertain, and intertwined nature of modern sociotechnical systems. Resilience engineering aims to provide support means for ensuring that systems can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions. This chapter aims to provide a summary of the scientific field of resilience engineering, as well as a description of two methods common in the field, the resilience analysis grid and the functional resonance analysis method. Following two examples, the chapter proposes a multidisciplinary research agenda for the field

On the design of systems-oriented university curricula

This paper proposes a tool called the Systems Education Matrix (SEM) for use in informing the work of developers of systems-oriented curricula at colleges and universities around the world. The SEM was developed by Team 1 at the 2008 IFSR Fuschl Conversation held at Fuschl am See in Austria. In order to manage the complex problems we are dealing with today, systems thinking is essential. It is clear that systems education should be acknowledged as an important 'scientific method' that can help today's society to deal with the complexities of contemporary issues. To serve this role effectively, systems education needs to be focused towards the various needs that exist. The members of Team 1 have focused on the nature of systems education that will be required to not only train systems specialists, but to make systems thinking and analysis an integral part of discipline focused research and management

Weak signals in healthcare: A case study on community-based patient discharge

To adjust performance to ensure the success of a task and prevent error, it is necessary to anticipate, identify and respond to variations in the work system. The objectives of this study were to develop a framework for the analysis of signals, which provide an indication of variations in the system, in the healthcare environment and qualitatively investigate signals in the context of community-based patient discharge. In addition to the signals, both traditional (Safety-I) and proactive safety (SafetyII) elements were investigated with six expert groups, from the field of community-based patient discharge. The signals identified and the safety elements were analysed using the SEIPS 2.0 model. The sources of the signals were identified as originating from work system elements. The proposed framework and method provide a preliminary basis for the investigation of signals and assists in highlighting the role that these can play in safety behaviour

Business Process Re-engineering and Information Security Planning: Opportunities for integration

Business process re-engineering (BPR) has come to recognize a need for the adoption of socio-technical methodologies and capabilities for knowledge representation of qualitative concerns. Security planning and decision-making has a similar need, and furthermore socio-technical methods common to BPR can be usefully applied in this capacity. The introduction of security models like Defense-in- Depth and similar efforts to recognize the organizational impact of security planning in operational security management serve as an initial step in educating security personnel and provide a more comprehensive view, but unfortunately, security decision-making has traditionally relied almost solely upon quantitative risk assessment, cost/benefit mechanisms, and related, functionalistic methodologies. This greatly limits the representational capacity of the decision process, and with it the possible dimensions of analysis in which to consider security issues. Within this paper, we briefly examine security planning and the relevant techniques of BPR and Socio-technical design, and present a framework for their integration within the context of information security. It is our contention that such methodologies can be utilized in the security decision process to facilitate representation of subjective concerns and broadly-defined issues germane to security policy, within an organizational context

Кибербезопасность в образовательных сетях

The paper discusses the possible impact of digital space on a human, as well as human-related directions in cyber-security analysis in the education: levels of cyber-security, social engineering role in cyber-security of education, “cognitive vaccination”. “A Human” is considered in general meaning, mainly as a learner. The analysis is provided on the basis of experience of hybrid war in Ukraine that have demonstrated the change of the target of military operations from military personnel and critical infrastructure to a human in general. Young people are the vulnerable group that can be the main goal of cognitive operations in long-term perspective, and they are the weakest link of the System.У статті обговорюється можливий вплив цифрового простору на людину, а також пов'язані з людиною напрямки кібербезпеки в освіті: рівні кібербезпеки, роль соціального інжинірингу в кібербезпеці освіти, «когнітивна вакцинація». «Людина» розглядається в загальному значенні, головним чином як та, що навчається. Аналіз надається на основі досвіду гібридної війни в Україні, яка продемонструвала зміну цілей військових операцій з військовослужбовців та критичної інфраструктури на людину загалом. Молодь - це вразлива група, яка може бути основною метою таких операцій в довгостроковій перспективі, і вони є найслабшою ланкою системи.В документе обсуждается возможное влияние цифрового пространства на человека, а также связанные с ним направления в анализе кибербезопасности в образовании: уровни кибербезопасности, роль социальной инженерии в кибербезопасности образования, «когнитивная вакцинация». «Человек» рассматривается в общем смысле, в основном как ученик. Анализ представлен на основе опыта гибридной войны в Украине, которая продемонстрировала изменение цели военных действий с военного персонала и критической инфраструктуры на человека в целом. Молодые люди являются уязвимой группой, которая может быть главной целью когнитивных операций в долгосрочной перспективе, и они являются самым слабым звеном Систем

Strategic design of culture for digital transformation

Industrial organizations need to take a cultural leap in order to integrate social systems with rapidly evolving digital technologies. Subsequently, aspiration for digital transformation enabled by organizational culture is ubiquitous; however, guidance in the literature on how to refresh the culture in pursuit of digital transformation strategy is underdeveloped. We conducted a diagnostic multi-case study on the organization culture in three globally renowned industrial organizations undergoing digital transformation strategy implementation. Through thematic analysis of qualitative data, we identified cultural artefacts, values in action, and assumptions that industrial organizations should refresh to enable digital transformation. It was found that forerunner industrial organizations’ approach to culture is strategically proactive and thoughtful. Furthermore, their leaders employed culture as a social control system for digital technology adoption. The research findings are summarized as an exploratory framework for the strategic design of culture for the purpose, governance, ecosystem, and organization of sociotechnical systems.© 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed