Enid Mumford

Enid Mumford mentions that there can be progressive improvement in work and life. (Bednar & Welch, 2016) suggests that key values underpinned their work: a desire to improve job design to create a safer and more enjoyable work systems and a wish to see greater democracy in both the workplace and in wider society.

Enid Mumford devised the ETHICS approach to the design and implementation of computer-based information systems. She explains in her work that while others are more intent on improving the ‘bottom line’ of corporations with the use of IT, Enid’s approach was more focused on the everyday workers and IT’s impact on their working lives (Avison et al., 2006).

Mumford’s 2000 conference paper titled “Socio-Technical Design: An Unfulfilled Promise or a Future Opportunity?” discussed the origins and evolution of socio-technical design, starting with its beginnings at the Tavistock institute. Mumford outlined the promises and possibilities of socio-technical design that were apparent at the time of its conception. She highlighted the ways that it had moved from success into failure, and evaluated the socio-technical initiatives that had occurred in different nations.

Despite the replacement of socio-technical projects by more efficient systems such as lean production, socio-technical notions remain essential when conceptualizing frameworks involving humans and computers (Mumford,2000).

Among Enid Mumford’s accomplishments and spearheading believing is the advancement of a coordinated strategy for frameworks usage named Effective Technical and Human Implementation of Computer Systems (ETHICS) that joins work plan as a feature of the frameworks arranging and execution exertion. This examination addresses why ETHICS at first rose in prominence and afterward declined throughout the long term. To respond to this inquiry, we apply Latour's (1999) five-circle structure to depict the arrangement of science. The discoveries uncover that Mumford held and adjusted numerous heterogeneous entertainers and assets that together added to the forming of ETHICS. As the substance of ETHICS was formed by the interweaving of numerous components, when a portion of these components later changed and subverted their past arrangement, the substance of ETHICS was not reshaped, and subsequently it lost its status and declined. The paper closes by drawing more broad exercises for IS research.

She was a companion of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS), also an Honorary Fellow of the BCS in 1984, and also a founder member and ex-chairperson of the BCS Sociotechnical Group.

Enid Mumford had always been passionate about developing the information systems research community, her favoured method of research came in the form of action research as this helps to promote cooperative development of systems, this research method is proven by the influential Manchester conference in 1984. This was the first conference to ever genuinely question the broadly differing conceptions of what established Information Systems research is.

In 1983 Enid Mumford was awarded the American Warnier Prize for her contributions to information science. In 1996, she was given an Honorary Doctorate by the university of Jyvaskyla in Finland. And in 1999, she was the only British recipient of a Leo Lifetime Achievement Award for Exceptional Achievement in Information Systems, one of only four in that year. Leo Awards are given by the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS).

While at MBS, Mumford developed a close relationship with the Tavistock Institute and became interested in their democratic socio-technical approach to work organisation. Since then, she has applied this approach to the design and implementation of computer-based systems and information technology. One of her largest socio-technical projects was with the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Boston. In the 1970s she became a member of the International Quality of Working Life Group, the goal of which was to spread the socio-technical message around the world. She later became a council member of the Tavistock Institute and was also a member of the US Socio-technical Round Table.

Enid Mumford’s draws success from the implementation of Socio-Technical Design; an organisational development method that focuses on the relationship between people and technology in the work environment. Its relationship with action research, was highlighted by its evolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Which improved general work practices as well as the relationship between management and workers. With the Global economy being in a recession during the early 1980s, Enid Mumford’s theory of socio-technical design gave way to several cost cutting methods that helped better organisations during this period. By making technology more viable in the workplace environment, enabling them to introduce lean production and suitable downsizing techniques.

Her work placed the social context and human activities/needs at the centre of IS design. Findings from projects across the 1960 and 1970s were consolidated by Mumford and her peers to bring rise to system development methodology known as ETHICS (Effective Technical & Human Implementation of Computer-based Systems).

Enid Mumford then joined the Faculty of Social Science at Liverpool University in 1956. Later she then spent a year at the University of Michigan, where she worked for the University Bureau of Public Health Economics and studied Michigan medical facilities while her husband took a higher degree in dental science. On returning to England, she joined the newly formed Manchester Business School (MBS), where she undertook many research contracts investigating the human and organisational impacts of computer based systems. During this time she became Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Director of the Computer and Work Design Research Unit (CAWDRU). She also directed the MBA programme for four years.

Enid Mumford was born on Merseyside in North West England, where her father Arthur McFarland was magistrate and her mother Dorothy Evans was teacher. She attended Wallasey high school, and received her BA in Social Science from Liverpool University in 1946.

Enid Mumford (6 March 1924 – 7 April 2006) was a British social scientist, computer scientist and Professor Emerita of Manchester University and a visiting fellow at Manchester Business School, largely known for her work on human factors and socio-technical systems.