Sociotechnical

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What Does Sociotechnical Mean?

The term "sociotechnical" is a broad way to combine people-oriented and technology-oriented practices and projects. The use of the word "technical," here, is also similarly broad, and does not refer just to material technologies, but to a technical tendency in general.

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Techopedia Explains Sociotechnical

Many people trace back the roots of the term sociotechnical to projects decades ago involving outfitting miners and other industrial workers with tools. Since then, sociotechnical thinking has come to represent a useful concept or paradigm for discussing the evolutions of cloud and software as a service, and how they relate to workflows.

In a general sense, sociotechnical orientation enables us to look at how humans and machines work together — and this phenomenon is increasing rapidly in the 21st century.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.