• workshop_dense_100#slide 36

Socio-technical systems are systems in which technology, people, roles, routines, governance arrangements, and organisational context are jointly configured to produce action. In the RAIDT papers, this point is sharpened for GenAI: behaviour at the point of use is shaped not only by model class but by prompts, retrieved material, tools, adapters, review checkpoints, and retention choices. A socio-technical system therefore cannot be governed adequately through model-level description alone. RAIDT responds by treating the run as the unit of governance and by asking whether one configured use can be reconstructed and assessed in context.

A simple RAIDT example is a workflow in which staff use GenAI to explain or support a decision. The technically generated text is only one part of the system. The organisationally relevant system also includes the approved knowledge source, the prompt template, the human reviewer, the applicable policy or criteria version, and the escalation route if the explanation is disputed. That is why socio-technical systems matter in RAIDT. The run-level evidence pack turns these interdependencies into a bounded review object, while the score profile evaluates the five pillars (Responsibility, Auditability, Interpretability, Dependability, Traceability). In practice, the framework uses anchors 1=missing / 3=partial / 5=audit-ready to distinguish weak, incomplete, and governable evidence states. The point is not to prove the model good in general, but to show whether this situated use was governable.

In a bank's adverse-action workflow, GenAI drafts an explanation for why a credit application was refused. The socio-technical system includes the model, the constrained prompt template, the eligibility criteria version, the supporting policy references, and the human reviewer who decides whether the explanation is suitable to send. If any of those elements are missing, the organisation may later struggle to justify the explanation to a customer, regulator, or internal auditor.

RAIDT addresses this by treating the refusal explanation as one configured run. The run-level evidence pack preserves the prompt template ID, criteria version, output, reviewer notes, and supporting sources. The score profile then shows whether the explanation was interpretable and traceable enough for use. The example makes the definition concrete: a socio-technical system is not just the model generating text, but the whole governed arrangement through which text becomes an organisational act.

• 17-RAIDT-Sociotechnical_M_v6
• 11-RAIDT_Academic_Logic_M_v11