Question

1 Social synergy arises when people are working together to co-create each other's
outcomes. Discuss, with examples, how socio-technical systems can facilitate the
provision of positive and negative synergies for their participants.
[5 Marks]
2. Discuss both (i) Network Reliability, and (ii) Resilience challenges that the Internet
faces as a socio-technical system.
[5 Marks]

please i need proper defined ans

Answer 1

a. A socio-technical system (STS) is one that considers requirements spanning hardware, software, personal, and community aspects. It applies an understanding of the social structures, roles and rights (the social sciences) to inform the design of systems that involve communities of people and technology. Examples of STSs include emails, blogs, and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The basis of socio-technical design is general systems theory (Bertalanffy, 1968). It describes what the disciplines of science have in common: sociologists see social systems, psychologists cognitive systems, computer scientists information systems and engineers hardware systems. All refer to systems. In general systems theory, no discipline has a monopoly on science and all are valid.

Socio-technical systems include:

1. People: People can be individuals or in groups. An organization employs the people, who build and make use of hardware and software, operate within law and regulations, and share and maintain the data.
2. Hardware: The classical meaning if the technology is hardware. It involves mainframe, workstations, peripheral, connecting devices.
3. Softwares: Software is nothing but an executable code. Softwares include operating system, utilities, application programs.
4. Law and regulations: There might be laws about the protection of privacy, or regulations of chips testing in military use, etc.
5. Data: The design of the socio-technical systems design involve what data are collected, to whome the data should be available and in which formats the data should be stored.

Example:
Lets say, Software engineers in Silicon Valley may build a software with all sorts of bells and whistles expecting everyone to be tech savy and without even considering the basic configuration of system requirement. If a large scale of people are in fact elderly and unaccustomed to the interface and have traditional systems operating on old technology then again the whole system will significantly reduced.

That’s the reason we are interested not only in technical dimension but also domain of Socio-technical systems. The system include non-technical elements such as people, processes, regulations, goals, culture, etc., as well as technical components such as computers, software, infrastructure, etc.

2. “Resilience is capacity of a system or an organization to react and recover after a disturbance, with a minimal effect on dynamic stability”.

“Resilience is an emergent property of complex systems”.

Sociotechnical systems resilience We focus now on these two key functions for resilience: “avoid” and “adapt”.

The “avoid” function consists of acquiring information at the operators’ level in order to anticipate and to avoid the accident, that is:

• Obtain a representation of the environment
• Obtain a representation of the system dynamic
• Identify the environment states that were not envisioned
• Evaluate the instantaneous or trend drifts
• Evaluate the proximity of the state of the system compared to the zones of danger.

The “adapt” function contains the following activities:

• Institute the bases allowing the training
• Allow the operators to evolve procedures to take account the environment evolutions
• Analyse the evolutions of the procedures, to generalise the good practises
• Conceive an evolutionary architecture system.

Network reliability

"Network reliability refers to the ability of a network to withstand the failure of components such as nodes or linkages (Colbourn, 1987)"

As this idea was originally conceived in order to evaluate the performance of a network when carrying out a desired operation, it is mainly applied with regard to transportation and electric circuits. The degree of network reliability is expressed in the form of probabilities for successful communications among specific pairs of nodes. Table 1 shows the general classification of reliability and corresponding terms depending on how many nodes are considered for measuring probabilistic connectedness

A network and application must not merely be able to pass information in a reliable manner.The most socio technical applications for buildings, factories, hospitals, or the power grid are long-term investments that must also be operable for a long time, perhaps decades in some cases. The networks are also typically unmanaged (at least in home, human, and transport applications). This implies that the network must be able to configure itself as environmental conditions or components in the network itself change. Even when the network itself is operating reliably, the nature of the applications running on the network may imply unreliable operation.

For instance, the ability to observe the physical world may be limited. Sensor technology may be imperfect, a bit error may appear, or the nature of the physical processes may involve some variation. As an example, a building humidity measurement system deployed by the authors has had a reliability rate of roughly one unexplained alarm per year in a small building – perhaps due to a bit error somewhere or a drop of condensation water. While such an error rate sounds small, it can be confusing for the end users, and become an unmanageable problem in configurations that are hundred or thousand times larger

Many applications are also safety critical. For instance, a “building health” application tracks an expensive asset. Fire alarms and human health tracking applications have direct consequences for human life. As a result, these applications have higher availability requirements than traditional networking services. One particular problem with these types of applications is that they may be invisible, and their failure is not easy to detect. Again, these applications differ from traditional network applications in that there may not be direct enduser interaction, at least not until the system must act. The applications must also be appropriately secured so that outside (or even inside) threats cannot compromise them

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