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.