Research Summaries

Back Advancing Post Mission Debrief and Data Collection Using a Sociotechnical System Design Approach

Fiscal Year 2018
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Holness, Karen
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary A challenge for Human Systems Integration (HSI) is the development and implementation of measurable HSI specific performance requirements at the platform or “whole-system” level, that are then added to the system capability and Systems Engineering requirements documents used to design/build/test the required system.
As defined by Taylor and Felten (1993), any organization, including service organizations, that (1) uses technology in its processes to convert inputs to outputs (e.g., has a technological subsystem); (2) uses people to coordinate process activities and to maintain the integrity of the organization itself (social subsystem); and (3) accounts for factors external to the organization and their impacts on its processes, inputs, and outputs (environmental subsystem), is in fact an Sociotechnical System (STS). The majority of systems used within the Navy, Marine Corps and Department of Defense (DoD) that require human interaction with hardware and software to execute a mission or Concept of Operations (CONOPS) can be considered STSs. This includes maintenance and support systems as well.
By leveraging standard processes and guidelines for developing performance requirements and qualitative and quantitative metrics, HSI and STS requirements, including corresponding measures of effectiveness and performance (MOEs and MOPs) will be developed, focusing only on the critical “whole system” design features of human-automation task allocation. These Post Mission Debrief requirements would identify the critical human-automation interactions, based on the identified key variances and the function allocation analysis. These requirements can then be carried through the various stages of a systems engineering process. With valid supporting data on expected system performance, these requirements can be justified and translated into other programmatic metrics such as system cost and schedule via separate cost-benefit analyses.
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