Light touch identification of cost/risk in complex socio-technical systems

Abstract

Information sharing within complex organisations is often source of considerable cost and risk. In previous work, we showed that points of highest IT cost/risk within an organisation are often located at the points where data moves from one context of use to another. We proposed a lightweight method of modelling the journeys data make within an organisation, and showed how to identify risky or costly boundaries. In this paper, we build on this previous work by evaluating the stability and completeness of the three core boundaries of our proposed method with staff from different clinical genomics hospital departments in the UK. Assessing our boundaries in the four new studies we found that although our core boundaries are stable in the new area of Clinical Genomics, domain-specific requirements of organisations can drive the need for additional boundaries. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of a general, low-cost process for identifying further boundaries of interest when applying the method to a new domain.