Increasingly products and services result from interactions among people who work across organizational, geographical, cultural and temporal boundaries. This has major implications for human factors and ergonomics (HFE), in particular, challenging the limits of the systems to be designed, and widening the range of system elements and dimensions that we need to consider. The design of sociotechnical systems that involve work across multiple boundaries requires better integration of the various sub-disciplines or components of HFE, as well as increased collaboration with other disciplines that provide either expertise regarding the domain of application or expertise in concepts that can enrich the system design.
In addition, ‘customers’ contribute significantly to the ‘co-production’ of products/services, as well as to their quality/safety. The design of sociotechnical systems in collaboration with both the workers in the systems and the customers requires increasing attention not only to the design and implementation of systems, but also to the continuous adaptation and improvement of systems in collaboration with customers.
This paper draws from research on human factors in the domains of health care and patient safety and of computer security.
A number of changes are occurring in the business and socio-economic environment that contribute to increasing the complexity of work systems. Vicente (1999) lists several factors that contribute to work system complexity (see Table 1 for a list of the dimensions of work system complexity and their relevance to the healthcare and computer security domains). Increasing work system complexity poses unique challenges to the people involved in the design, implementation and maintenance of sociotechnical systems, including human factors and ergonomics (HFE) researchers and professionals. In this paper, we discuss two emerging trends that contribute to increased work system complexity: (1) working across organizational, geographical, cultural and temporal boundaries, and (2) the increasing role of the customer in product/service design.The examples used in this paper draw from the healthcare/patient safety and computer security domains. Patient safety is a systemic problem of healthcare organizations worldwide. The issue of medical errors and harm caused by poorly designed healthcare systems made headlines in the US with the publication of the 1999 Institute of Medicine report, “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System” (Kohn et al., 1999). The World Health Organization has recognized patient safety as a strategic issue in order to improve health and health care worldwide (http://www.who.int/patientsafety). HFE has a long tradition of involvement in helping assess and solve performance, quality and safety problems in health care (Chapanis and Safrin, 1960).
The issue of computer security is also a global problem, but it has received considerably less attention and contributions from HFE as compared to health care and patient safety. The 2005 CSI/FBI [Computer Security Institute & Federal Bureau of Investigation] survey of 699 people representing various industries shows that 56% of the companies experienced some type of unauthorized use of computer systems within the past year (Gordon et al., 2005), including laptop or mobile theft, denial of service, telecom fraud, unauthorized access to information and virus. There is slow recognition among computer security specialists of the importance of non-technical (human and organizational) factors in ensuring and maintaining computer security. For instance, in the CSI/FBI 2005 survey, a large number of respondents (63–70%) identified awareness training in various areas of security (security policy, security management, access control systems and network security) as very important to their organizations. HFE can make a significant contribution to improving the design and implementation of computer security technologies, policies and management systems (Carayon et al., 2005a).
The domains of health care and computer security pose unique challenges to HFE because of their high complexity. Much patient care involves people (patients, their families, and healthcare providers and staff) who work across various boundaries. Patients (and their families and caregivers) have an increasingly important role in the quality and safety of the care provided to them. Computer security is becoming increasingly complex because of the (distributed, decentralized) Internet and other networked systems that involve people working across various boundaries. Those people have a critical role in computer security: they can directly or indirectly affect security through their behaviors and actions (e.g., writing down passwords), or they can alert computer security managers of possible security breaches (e.g., when experiencing slow response to computer network access).
In the remainder of the paper, the trend towards working across boundaries and the implications for a greater focus on system interactions and integration within and outside the HFE discipline are discussed. We then describe the increasing role of the customer in product/service design, and the subsequent need for developing more comprehensive models of HFE in system design.
The increasing complexity of sociotechnical systems in domains such as health care and computer security poses unique challenges to HFE professionals and researchers. Further integrating the different dimensions and elements of sociotechnical systems is necessary to anticipate the implications of working across organizational, geographical, cultural and temporal boundaries. HFE researchers and practitioners also need to reach out to domain experts and to other connected disciplines. This can significantly improve the impact of HFE on the design of sociotechnical systems. Finally, we need to pay greater attention to developing and implementing principles for macroergonomic continuous system adaptation and improvement.
