Efficiency Driven Socio-Technical System Design

In this paper we advocate that the efficiency measurement paradigm could transition from an evaluation-to-rank towards an evaluation-to-design paradigm. We suggest that this transition can inform the design of socio-technical systems. In order to achieve this type of design would require the consideration of issues associated with organizational design, enterprise systems engineering along with system complexity. We recommend that the required research be conducted within inter- or trans-disciplinary context with all of their benefits and challenges to achieve high quality application results. We describe five illustrations conducted over the years at Virginia Tech’s System Performance Laboratory. We present these illustrations by describing the societal or socio-technical system needs that drove the research, the research constraints and considerations, the stakeholders affected by the research, the approach or approaches used, the feedback to theory and open modeling issues, and a description of societal and socio-technical system impacts. We describe the potential of a complex adaptive systems approach as an enabler of socio-technical system design and conclude with a series of open-ended questions and issues.