Enid Mumford

Enid Mumford, who lived from 6 March 1924 to 7 April 2006, was a British social scientist and computer scientist, Professor Emerita of Manchester University and a visiting fellow at Manchester Business School, largely known for her work on human factors and socio-technical systems. She was born on Merseyside in North West England and received her BA in social science from Liverpool University in 1946. She worked in industry as personnel manager for an aircraft factory and production manager for an alarm clock manufacturer, and carried out research in industrial relations in the Liverpool docks and the North West coal industry. Early in her career she realised that the implementation of large computer systems generally failed to produce a satisfactory outcome, even when the technology was adequate, because of human factors, and she emphasized participative system design that takes users' social and technical needs into account. She was a Fellow and in 1984 an Honorary Fellow of the British Computer Society, received the American Warnier Prize in 1983 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Jyvaskyla in 1996, and in 1999 was the only British recipient of a Leo Lifetime Achievement Award for Exceptional Achievement in Information Systems.