HCC Implications for the Procurement Process

Most system designers and human factors engineers have participated in projects that culminated in systems that were highly constrained by short-term cost considerations. In the procurement of information processing and intelligent technology for complex socio-technical domains, the focus on short-term cost considerations at the expense of human-centering considerations always comes with a hefty price down the road. This price weighs much more heavily on users´ shoulders than on those of the technologists or project managers. The authors use as an example the US National Weather Service´s Advanced Weather Information Processing System. The authors argue that regarding HCC notions as design challenges or policies for procurement promises to make information technologies more intelligent by making them human-centered.