Digitization of Industrial Work Environments and the Emerging Challenges of Human-Digitized System Collaborative Work Organization Design

Abstract

This paper discussed how the digitization of human work affect human performance of digitized work entailing both physical and mental activities, as well as the human’s social interaction entailing collaboration between the human’s and the digitized work system. It is posited that in the digitization process of the industrial work environment, the digitized system designer’s lack of knowledge about the external world of the embedded humans may result in the designer’s inability to accurately predict the outcomes of his/her decisions on work organization, especially the creation of positive collaboration and social harmony between digitized systems and humans towards enhanced productivity. It is concluded that analytic strategies for understanding the interactive work dynamics between humans and digitized systems, which can serve as key for identifying both the innovative and constraining characteristics of effective and efficient association between humans and digitized work systems towards collaborative work organization design should be developed. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019.