Introduction to information systems T. Cornford, M. Shaikh is1 060 2013

digital technologies
that lie at the heart of computer-based 
information handling, their characteristics and capabilities 
• the 
people
who work with, become part of, or use information 
systems 
• the 
tasks
that they wish to undertake and their specific needs or 
requirements 
• the social or organisational 
structure
within which an information 
systems is established (for example, a firm, a factory or government 
department, a community or society).
We could choose to take just one of these four perspectives: the 
perspective of technology, the task it is applied to, the people who use it, 
or the organisational or social structure that all the above elements are 
embedded in. 
However, so these four elements are all in relation to one another, we 
usually need to consider more than one perspective, and sometimes all 
four. This idea or ‘model’ of technology in organisations structured around 
four core elements was proposed in the 1960s by Harold Leavitt. It is 
known as ‘Leavitt’s diamond’ and suggests that it is always possible to 
relate any one of these core elements to the others, and that when or if we 
change any one, it is very likely to have some consequence for the others. 
Understanding a dynamic relationship can often give us a clue to provide 
answers to the ‘
so what?
’ questions.
People
Task
Structure
Technology
Figure 1.1: Leavitt’s diamond: the basis for a sociotechnical view of information 
systems.
Leavitt’s diamond expresses a fundamentally sociotechnical view of 
information systems. That is, it is in part social (about people and human 
organisations) and in part technical (technology is applied to specific 
tasks). This broad concept is important to grasp at the outset because it 
implies that, given any problem or situation that we study, we should ask 
both how the technology influences the people or the organisation, and 

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IS1060 Introduction to information systems
4
how people may influence the technology choices and the way it is used. 
We cannot, as it were, privilege one element and ignore the others. 
For the most part in this course we will consider formal organisations as 
the ‘structure’ referred to in Leavitt’s diamond. For example, the uses of 
ICT, the people and the relevant task could be within businesses, such as 
a car manufacturer, a retail store, a bank or an airline, or they could be 
in public or not-for-profit bodies, such as a government department, a 
hospital, a school or a city council. In such cases the people will usually 
be the workers or employees of such organisations, and their customers 
or clients. But as citizens and in other parts of our lives beyond any work 
setting we also use information systems – for example as a student, when 
talking to friends on Facebook or by email, or when buying products and 
services over the internet. Thus in this course we will sometimes shift our 
understanding of the ‘structure’ we want to consider to include society at 
large, or some section of it. This is, for example, the case when we discuss 
issues such as personal privacy, data protection and rights of access to 
information. 
Technology remains important even if it is not the exclusive focus and we 
certainly do consider it in this course. It is not possible to comprehend 
how organisations build and use information systems to serve their 
needs if we do not have a good level of understanding and experience of 
the technologies themselves. For this reason this course includes a part 
devoted to studying contemporary technologies, and awards 25 per cent 
of the final marks based on practical experience in developing simple 
information systems using standard software packages: a database and a 
spreadsheet. This is explained more in Chapter 2.