XXI Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS
Growing in a digital and sustainable society
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OISI Workshop – ancillary event of the ITAIS Conference on October 11th 2024 at Piacenza

“Organizational Interventions in Social Informatics: the Design, Development, and Adoption, of Inter-Organizational Systems”

Aim

It is a somewhat original event, remainder of the forty-seven years old, foundational, Scandinavian Conference IRIS, based on conversations and discussions by participants of a paper pre-examined by all, appositely selected by the event chair, briefly presented by a participant different from its author, rather than presentations by their author of conference accepted papers.

The objective of the workshop is to present and illustrate two pieces of current research, considered of special interest to the IS community, experiencing, elaborating, reflecting, and discussing with workshop participants some of the effective organizational intervention approaches of critical socio technical character, focusing the area of inter-organizational, multi-agency federation systems, in contrast to intra-organizational, single company integration systems.

Antecedents

A number of approaches of to social informatics have been proposed in Europe in the last three decades, all offering the opportunity of clearly differentiating the objectives of reducing uncertainty and managing ambiguity, by co-constructing solutions with an external agent, while enhancing aspects of relating, communication, participation, and learning, beyond achieving functional rationality.

In our familiar, first order, rational development process, we traverse phases of vision, plan, execution, and evaluation to manage uncertainty which represents risk and it is the basis for all of our standard project management approaches. However, every so often something different happens and, when we look back, what we see is that we have started doing things that we have discarded, and a second order loop starts for the management of ambiguity rather than uncertainty: the double loop learning of Bateson, Argyris and Schön (1,2).

Claudio Ciborra’s paradigm for innovation (3) has been to overcome the limitations of the extant ‘formative context’, promoting its evolution. It amounts to a much enriching extension of the concept of double loop learning of Bateson, Argyris and Schön, in a foundational paper, entitled ”Formative contexts and information technology: understanding the dynamics of innovation in organisations”

Two independent organizational socio-technical intervention approaches were developed in the years 2000-2010, one in Italy, termed Social Practice Design (SPD), strongly influenced by the thought of Claudio Ciborra, at the University of Trento (4, 5, 6); the other in Great Britain, in the Centre for Social Informatics of the University of Newcastle, named Social Informatics Intervention (SII) (7). The two schools have eventually merged their approaches: to envisage what they have called a therapeutic co constructive, client consultant relation in research intervention, to promote deutero learning in an organization (8), thus modifying Ciborra’s formative context in desired ways.

Generally in accord with these ideas, the spiralling nature of an ongoing ‘double-helix’ of action and reflection, in pursuing the desirable change, has been underlined (9).

One of the main contexts of multi-organisational systems’ construction and deployment, which has provided the context for the development of concepts of the neo-socio- technical perspective (10) , has been the planning, coordination and delivery of health and social care in communities. In particular it has been concerned with how these systems respond to complex, long term conditions that involve multiple problems and pathways.

The complexities of these contexts and the failure of conventional Data Processing and Distribution (DPD) paradigm approaches, such as the development of shared electronic records at the national or regional level and attempts to develop joint assessments of need across different organizational and care settings, have resulted in critiques of this approach. Mike Martin and Rob Wilson have recently outlined an alternative approach based on what they have called the Information Communications (IC) paradigm, also introducing the fruitful notion of ‘epistemic registers’. (10)

Two topics, two papers

The first topic is relational service and its support infrastructure: Relational socio-technical systems live in co-evolution with their socio-cultural context: they cannot be pre-designed, must emerge and grow from the appropriation of a simple primordial system; emergence with the operation and governance of a community of interest and practice. The role of the IT industry changes: from design and development of commercial infrastructure, to supporting user communities in structuring their own infrastructure.

The second topic is third order cybernetic interventions for organisational innovation during the digital revolution. Reflecting on change, in observing the experience of a university sociotechnical research group dedicated to instill change for social informatics innovation in client organisations and enterprises.

The link between the two topics resides in a 2002 paper entitled: Use of use cases in design for end user design in use (13). At the time, design meant essentially software design and development. It was 6 years before Apple introduced Apps and Icons in I-phones, which proved the use of that concept. The concept of design for end user design in use is now revived and applied here, to the innovative technical job, for the IT industry to do: develop Lego type blocks for users/members of relational service communities, to employ in configuring and developing further by themselves their infrastructure, under maieutic guidance. These blocks can be treated as transactional routines, as Martin points out (11), so that they can in fact be designed by using use case language.

Paper 1 (12):

Mike Martin The Trustworthy, Governable Platform: supporting accountability and governability in complex, multiparty enterprise.

 

The key arguments of the paper are clear. Before starting the analysis, they are recalled here, with the main results.

The key character of relationality and of relational public service is direct human experience, requiring both human knowledgeable participation, and evaluation.

Exploring the epistemology of systems as black boxes, systems that are based on human participation are defined constitutively determinable by cybernetics scholar Krippendorff, who also indicates that these are by necessity second order cybernetic systems. In fact, authentic, communicative human actions are committed to mutual understanding (Habermas). The conversations taking place in the information infrastructures supporting evolving relationality, involve communicative actions. This implies that a) conversations on conversations will be part of these conversations, and b) they will regard, in addition to other things, second order governance of all relational aspects.

Krippendorff’s argument is here seen to be crucial in linking the socio cultural science of relationality of public service to the logics of informatics and platform engineering of support infrastructures; offering, via the analysis of purposeful human enterprise, the pathway to a theory of relational enterprise, connected to a theory of conversational information communication.

This linkage is cleverly exploited by Mike Martin for constructing a solid logical architecture in his extremely effective paper on the conceptual analysis of relational public service and supporting infrastructure.

The paper illustrates how this linkage is not just a philosophical consideration, but it constitutes the compass to explore and analyse systems and processes we have observed and experienced over the last few decades (11), that have been involved in the policy formation, procurement, delivery, management, and evaluation public services and support systems in the health, care and welfare sectors. As well as to explore and design new, more adequate systems and processes.

Relevant results:

  1. Relational governance and human learning are (re)-istitutionalised in public service and infrastructure
  2. Causality is exposed of why relationality demands a shift in information systems paradigm
  3. Conversations must comprehend conversations on conversations, i. e., second order governance
  4. Relational socio-technical systems live in co-evolution with their socio-cultural context: they cannot be pre-designed, must emerge and grow from the appropriation of a simple primordial system; emergence with the operation and governance of a community of interest and practice
  5. The role of the IT industry changes: from design and development of commercial infrastructure, to supporting user communities in structuring their own infrastructure.

Relevance of Martin’s entire analytical construction

Martin’s worldview on information platforms and their functionalities, in information and communication service and infrastructure, is generated by participative engagement and evaluation in the emergence of the globalised automation, media, information, and communications technology environment in Europe, over the last four decades. (11)

The first of two basic tools applied in his socio-technical analysis, is the second order cybernetics of purposeful human activity, a concept he elaborated thoroughly in a 2009 published work on social informatics intervention (7). In his words, selected from the TGP paper (12), Cybernetics focusses on the relationships between information and real-world processes. In processes involving humans, informational aspects cannot be restricted to first order. The socio-technical demands an overarching, second order governance: guiding principles and values, with boundary constraints, in the context of the commitment to a mission. For multiple peer parties engaged in complex, risky, unpredictable emergent relationships, accountability is an overriding principle of governance. Harm or benefit require, and warrant, inquiry into responsibility. Accountability is right to ask and duty to respond. Current information platform functionalities are not sufficient to reliably underpin accountability in multi-party, safety critical, socio-technical contexts. Commercial platforms have deleterious social, economic and political side effects, in the pursuit to ensnare, surveil and exploit their users and enrich their proprietors.

A new platform paradigm is required. What we need is creating, deploying and governing domains, within and upon, existing technologies and infrastructures, as clearly visible and maintainable safe zones, operating under explicit rules and procedures which can be re-negotiated and evolve in use through governance. This ensures that the relationship between the published policies of each hub are the ones that are actually applied, and that policy can be renegotiated and republished, within the system, rather than as management and technical activities distinct from its operation and use.

To this end, to design the new service and infrastructure architectures, he thoroughly applies his second tool of socio-technical analysis, to structure in an incredibly concise effective way, in its real substance, the architectural discourse of public service and related information technology: the concept of epistemic registers, illustrated in a published work on Inter-organisational systems (10).

Socio-Cultural View Individual and Collective Identities Values and Principles New meanings and values come into being
Conversational View Roles, relationships and responsibilities Meanings include intentions
Informatics View Codes, terms and objects Meanings are pre-defined and concrete
Engineering View Bits – terra-bytes, channels and bandwidth Measurements but no meanings

Fig 1: Epistemic Registers

It serves to examine the stack of epistemic registers of the architectural discourse of socio- technical systems. With this armamentary, he tackles in the correct way the transition from transactional to relational service and its infrastructure, conceptualising the relational: a relational service includes the interpretation of purposes, intentions and experiences. The intended experience is part of the definition: a different epistemic stance: idealist-constructivist rather than empiricist. A relational service provider accepts responsibility for both its operation and its outcomes. ‘Conversation’: a definition of rights responsibilities between roles in delivery and reception of a service.

Thus, he goes on to illustrate how and why relationality demands a shift in information systems paradigm. He explores the possibility and characteristics of a Trustworthy Governable Platform (TGP) which is based on the structured communications paradigm, and which addresses the need for the dependable maintenance of accountability among roles within peer organisations while still supporting the dynamic emergence and evolution of these roles and relationships.

His worldview on the evaluation of information platforms and their functionalities, based on first principles, is absolutely original: it constitutes the mole on which Mike Martin stands, a vantage point in the academic and industrial arena of modern digital technology.

Paper 2 (13):

Gianni Jacucci Unveiling Subconscious, Autopoietic, Reflexive Feedback Mechanisms of Second Order Governance, from the Narration of Cognitive Autobiography of an ICT Lab, during the Digital Revolution.

 

Sense

How does subjectivity show itself, and plays its role, in the cognitive life of a university research lab? The reading lens of the paper is that social groups subsume autopoietic psychological mechanisms for survival. These are generated by the sedimentation and persistence of interpretation schemes of the world, responsible for their routinary scheme of action. And consist in the application of reflexive feedback, on external solicitations not aligned with those schemes, resulting in their selective neglection.

The paper presents an interesting retrospective on the development of a research group over the past 30+ years. It brings points of discussion and insights of relevance for the STS community. It could be helpful in understanding the history of the community and in providing a platform for discussions on future developments. It can also serve as an inspiration and a historical capture for those entering the field.

Examining the experiences of LII and the methodology (SPD) developed through practice, the author retrospectively positions it in a philosophical framework. Using the concept of autopoiesis to describe the persistence of the lab’s approach and also reflecting on how change due to new factors / situations is managed, the author justify the methodology and identify Shi as a guiding criterion.

This is achieved by writing about the history of the lab and the credentials of those involved, and by examining the contributing ideas. Giving subjectivity and inter-subjectivity a firmer foundation and a place in the method is important. Aim: an epistemologically consistent approach, based in practice. These are important ideas.

Detail

The paper reflects on change in observing the experience of a university sociotechnical research group dedicated to instill change for innovation in client organisations and enterprises. Its cognitive and action trajectory is influenced by subjective factors: intention and interpretation. Continuity and change are both present: the trajectory of the group exhibits the dynamic interplay of two components of subjectivity, a change of focus in persistence of scheme, and a tension between stability and change. The paper illustrates the meanings the group gave to their practice while laying down mission-critical theoretical considerations – autopoiesis -.

The aim of the work is to experience a fragment of phenomenological understanding (PU) of the cognitive dynamics of an STS-aware ICT uptake Laboratory during the digital revolution. PU is an intuitive going along the meaning, while staying close and present to the total situation of the phenomenon. Reading the codes that we observers invent in order to codify what nature is about, thus unveiling subconscious, autopoietic, reflexive feedback mechanisms of second order governance from work published over three decades by the ICT Lab, as if it were the narration of its cognitive autobiography.

Results

The result of the article is to unveil the character of the tension between the two autopoietic mechanisms in the group cognitive trajectory, along the digital revolution undergone by the world that forces innovations into organisations and enterprises. Tending, one, to repeat: repeat the specific, successful therapeutic approach for instilling and supporting change of specific traits of the client’s culture: a socially autopoietic mechanism, internally appropriated by the group. And, the other, to change: change by accepting a new specific trait of the client’s culture, a type of innovation that then becomes a permanent feature of the Lab cognition and action., whenever the object of this focus – it reads – satisfied a specific criterium: a second social autopoietic mechanism.

In fact, the trajectory of the group exhibits the dynamic interplay of two components of subjectivity, change of focus in persistence of scheme, a tension between stability and change. It illustrates structure and dynamics of the intertwined autopoietic subjectivities, exhibiting aspects of:

  1. a) the continuity of cognition and intervention scheme of the Lab, as an entity solicitating clients for innovation change; and
  2. b) the suddenly changing action focus orientation of its change support work.

The ambition: The criterion it reads shows the character of the tension: only modern machines, producing holistic impacts on reality, on people computers and work, are selected and accepted as additional arrows in the Lab’s quiver (faretra): only those modern machine changes comporting new interpretation schemes, new ways of involving people, new computer technologies, and new organisation. Changes that are as holistic as the “Shi”, the oriental concept holistically compounding action, structure, and beauty, mentioned in a quote of Claudio Ciborra.

 

References

  1. Bateson, G.: Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Paladin Books. (1973)
  2. Argyris, C. and Schön, D: Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. (1974)
  3. Ciborra C.: Formative contexts and information technology: understanding the dynamics of innovation in organisations, Accounting, Management and Information Technology 4, 2: 61-86 (1994); reprinted in “Bricolage, Care and Information: Claudio Ciborra’s Legacy in Information Systems Research” by C. Avgerou, G. F. Lanzara and L. P. Willcocks Palgrave, Macmillan (2009)
  4. Jacucci G.: Social Practice Design, pathos, improvisation, mood, and bricolage: the Mediterranean way to make place for IT? AIS eLibrary Proceedings of MCIS2007 in Venice, Italy. (2007) http://aisel.aisnet.org/mcis2007/19/.
  5. Jacucci G., Tellioglu H., Wagner I.: Design Games as a part of Social Practice Design: a case of employees elaborating organizational problems. Proceedings of MCIS2007 in Venice (2007), and ECIS 2008 in Limerick, AIS eLibrary, http://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2008/207/.
  6. Cattani, C., Jacucci, G.: From software development service provider – helas, a captive resource! – to one’s own products and brand . AIS eLibrary Proceedings of MCIS2006 in Venice, It (2007): http://aisel.aisnet.org/mcis2007/18/.
  7. Martin M., Walsh S., Wilson R. (2009) A Social Informatics Intervention: theory, method and practice”. KITE Research Group, Newcastle University: http://www.woa.sistemacongressi.com/web/woa2009/papers/Martin_Walsh_Wilson.pdf
  8. Jacucci G. and Martin M.: A second step back for managing ambiguity. AIS eLibrary MCIS2008, (2008). http://aisel.aisnet.org/mcis2008/26
  9. Bednar P. and Welch C: Contextual Inquiry and Socio-Technical Practice, In Kybernetes 43(9/10). (2014)
  10. Martin M. and Wilson R.: “Inter-organisational systems: a neo-socio-technical perspective” (2020). https://aisel.aisnet.org/ukais2020/22
  11. Martin M.: “The Trustworthy, Governable Platform: supporting accountability and governability in complex, multiparty enterprise.”  https://www.academia.edu/123604005/The_Trustworthy_Governable_Platform_supporting_accountability_and_governability_in_complex_multi_party_enterprise (2024)
  12. Jacucci G.: Unveiling Subconscious, Autopoietic, Reflexive Feedback Mechanisms of Second Order Governance, from the Narration of Cognitive Autobiography of an ICT Lab, during the Digital Revolution. Preprint.m(2024)             https://www.academia.edu/122684635/Subjectivity_playing_leapfrog_Keep_vs_Change_The_cognitive_autobiography_of_an_ICT_Lab_during_the_Digital_Revolution
  13. Jacucci, D. Calzà and V. D’Andrea, “Use of Use Cases in Design for End User Design in Use”, Report, Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento (2002). Seminar at PDC-02 The Participatory Design Conference, in Malmo, Sweden 2002. https://www.academia.edu/68429222/

 

Workshop Co-chairs

  • Vincenzo D’Andrea (University of Trento, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science)
  • Gianni Jacucci (University of Trento, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science)

Feel free to contact the WS Co-chairs using the following email address: itais2024_WS@easychair.org     or   gianni.jacuccu@gmail.com

anticipating intention to participate. In particular, candidatures of participants to briefly present one of the two papers are encouraged.

Registration

Registration to the main conference entitles you to participate both in the “Organizational Interventions in Social Informatics” workshop and all sessions and social events of the ItAIS2024 main conference.

WORKSHOP PROGRAMME Friday, October 11, 2024

Session A (Room: tbd) – 9:00-10.30 Chair: Gianni Jacucci

  • Brief presentation and ample discussion of Paper 1

Session A (Room: tbd) – 11:00-12.30 Chair: Vincenzo D’Andrea

  • Brief presentation and ample discussion of Paper 2