A manifesto for a socio-technical approach to NHS and social care IT-enabled business change - to deliver effective high quality health and social care for all

Abstract

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.