SI aim to ensure that technical research agendas and system designs are relevant to people's lives. The keyword is relevance, ensuring that technical work is socially-driven rather than technology-driven. Relevance has two dimensions: process and substance.
Design and implementation processes need to be relevant to the actual social dynamics of a given site of social practice, and the substance of design and implementation (the actual designs, the actual systems) need to be relevant to the lives of the people they affect.
SI sets agendas for all the technical work in two ways:
1) more superficially, by drawing attention to functionalities that people value, thus setting priorities for design and implementation
2) more fundamentally, by articulating those analytical categories that have been found useful in describing social reality, and that which therefore should also define technical work in/for that reality as well.
Unfortunately, many technical professionals have viewed social concerns as peripheral.
One key role of SI is to stand things back on their feet, so that social concerns are central and define the ground that technical work stands on. Professional systems designer oriented to social informatics could design a new system. A systems designer with a socio-technical orientation does not simply consider these elements while working in a 'design studio' far away from the people who will use a specific system. Effectively On Similarities and Differences between Social Informatics and Information Systems designing socio-technical systems also requires upon a set of 'discovery processes' to help the designers understand which features and tradeoffs will most appeal to the people who are most likely to use the system.
There are a number of discovery processes for learning about the preferences of the men and women who are likely to use these systems. These discovery processes include workplace ethnography, focus group, user participation in design teams, and participatory design strategies. These approaches differ in many significant ways, such as the contextual richness of the understandings that they reveal and the extent to which they give the people who will use systems influence and power in their design.
These issues are the subject of a lively body of research that overlaps social informatics.As we develop more elaborate ICTs and try to use them in almost every sphere of social life, we face fresh theoretical challenges for social informatics.
Its possibilities and value are illustrated by some of key ideas:
1) the social shaping of ICTs,
2) the conceptions of highly intertwined socio-technical networks,
3) roles of social incentives in energizing new electronic media, and
4) the conceptualization of ICT infrastructure as socio-technical practices and resources.
First, to set the groundwork for socio-technical networks, start with a more general concept, that ICT, in practice, is socially shaped. In the standard (non-social informatics) accounts of ICT and social change, it is common to hear information technologies characterized as tools, and questions are asked about their social impacts. To take a wider perspective, the combination of equipment, people, governance structures, and ICT policies is called "the local computing package".
Secondly, the local computing package is also an example of a socio-technical network. A socio-technical network brings together equipment, equipment vendors, technical specialists, upper-level managers, ICT policies, internal funding, and external grant funding with the people who will use information systems in the course of other work (such as policing, accounting, taxing or planning).
These elements are not simply a static list but are interrelated within a matrix of social and technical dependencies.
Thirdly, one key idea of social informatics research is that the social context of information technology development and use plays a significant role in influencing the ways in which people use information and technologies and thus affects the consequences of the technology for work, organizations, and other social relationships. Social context can be characterized by particular incentive systems for using, organizing and sharing information in different work groups and work roles.
Finally, workable computer applications are usually supported by a strong sociotechnical infrastructure. The surface features of computer systems are the most visible and are the primary subject of debates and systems analyses. But they are only one part of computerization projects. Many key parts of information systems are neither immediately visible nor interesting in their novelty. They include technical infrastructure such as reliable electricity. They also involve a range of skilled support - from people to documents system features and training people to use them, to rapid-response consultants who can diagnose and repair system failures.