What is Socio-Technical Configuration

Managing industrial complexities and inherent risks in the modern economic climate has become quite a challenging task for more sectors than ever before. Apart from more formal financial constraints and risks, various industrial environments encounter a wide range of risks and uncertainties due to the inherent dynamics of the business environments. Capitalizing on business opportunities and realizing commercial ambitions in these sensitive business environments demands prudent and innovative solutions to manage different functional and operational modes where resources and capabilities are organized and deployed in a relatively different manner within the business clusters. It not only relies on economical capabilities, but also importantly on technology-dependent social capabilities. Interestingly, this leads to some form of structural re-configuration in a business-to-business transactional context generating an environment of so-called Hybrid Intelligence (Hybrid-I). This chapter explores and elaborates on the Hybrid-I concept as a modern scenario with reference to developments within the offshore oil & gas production sector.