Sociotechnical Systems

Three posts on ERP failure, and none of them applied structuration theory. Giddens and Orlikowski explain exactly why the same SAP instance produces different o...

Every healthcare IS post I have written is about breach cost. The real story is that the fax machine is still the primary interoperability tool, and structurati...

Shadow IT was about unauthorized tools. Shadow AI is about unauthorized autonomous agents making decisions on your behalf. Delegation theory explains why that d...

McKinsey puts the automation midpoint at 2045. We are in 2026. That nineteen-year gap is not just calendar time -- it is the sociotechnical distance between a c...

Activity theory says you cannot understand tool use without the full activity system around it. The same tool in two systems means two completely different thin...

ANT treats software, databases, and infrastructure as actants with the same analytical standing as humans. In IS research, that changes everything about how we ...

The 80% autonomous resolution prediction is specific enough to be testable. As an IS researcher, the interesting question is not whether the technology can do i...

Multiagent AI systems are not just tools being used. They act, and their outputs become part of the organizational structure that shapes the next cycle.

Training AI models consumes staggering amounts of energy. Trist and Bamforth showed in 1951 why optimizing only the technical subsystem creates a collapse.

Bostrom and Heinen said in 1977 that MIS failures are sociotechnical. Half a century later, AI implementation fails the same way.

Alter's work system framework already has a slot for AI. It is not the technology element. It is the participant element.

Goodhue and Thompson said performance follows fit, not features. AI is a family of tools, and the wrong one for the task will fail the same way every time.

Star and Griesemer's boundary objects are plastic enough to serve local needs but robust enough to hold shared identity. That is why the spreadsheet survives.

Gartner's April 2026 CEO survey puts 80% of chief executives on record expecting AI to force operational overhauls. McKinsey's data shows only 7% of organizatio...

When enterprise software exhausts its users, that is not a training problem. It is a design problem with a cognitive load explanation.

I confused structuration theory's three modalities with institutional theory's three pillars for months. A study partner caught it, and getting corrected was th...

One page of sticky notes became a wall of connected IS theories. RBV, dynamic capabilities, structuration, affordances, institutional theory: the connections be...

Reading Sarker et al. (2019) for the third time during comps prep, the 56% stat finally hit me: more than half of IS papers do not theorize technology at all.

Melvin Conway observed in 1967 that organizations produce systems that mirror their communication structures. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

DORA 2024 found 90% of organizations have adopted at least one platform engineering practice. The gap between adoption and value is a sociotechnical problem, no...

A digital twin sounds simple: a virtual replica of a physical thing. In practice, building one that actually works requires better data infrastructure than most...

Distributed IS projects face coordination overhead that project plans rarely account for. COVID made this everyone's problem at once.

When AI runs on a factory sensor or hospital monitor instead of the cloud, the technical subsystem becomes physically distributed and harder to monitor. STS the...

When ERP implementations fail, the postmortem always says the software was fine and the change management was missing. That phrase hides what actually happened:...

After decades of high-profile disasters, large organizations still repeat the same ERP mistakes. The problem is rarely the software.

Galbraith (1974) said organizations design themselves to handle the information their tasks demand. IS exists to close the gap between what a task requires and ...

Trist and Bamforth showed in 1951 that optimizing only the technical subsystem destroys the social one. Silicon Valley rediscovered this lesson and called it a ...

RLHF mirrors Giddens' duality of structure, creating a recursive loop where human preferences shape AI outputs and reshape human preferences.

Ferneley and Sobreperez's workaround types explain why employees bypass official AI tools. Shadow AI is task-technology fit failure, not compliance failure.

The origin story of sociotechnical systems theory is not a feel-good tale about teamwork. It is a cautionary tale about what happens when you optimize only the ...

Giddens built structuration theory around structure and agency being mutually constitutive. Orlikowski pointed it at technology, and IS has never been the same ...

Why the same ERP or Slack deployment thrives in one department and collapses in another, explained through structuration theory, Orlikowski's duality of technol...

Goodhue and Thompson showed that performance depends on fit between task and technology, not on whether the tool is good in the abstract.

Venkatesh added hedonic motivation, habit, and price value to UTAUT for consumer contexts. Enterprise software still runs on the utilitarian-only version. That ...

AI-native platforms let anyone generate code from a prompt. Trist and Bamforth showed in 1951 why optimizing only the technical subsystem creates a maintenance ...

Ferneley and Sobreperez argued workarounds are not user failure but evidence of system-task misfit. The workaround is the real requirements document.