A Workaround Design System for Anticipating, Designing, and/or Preventing Workarounds

Abstract

Idealized system design produces requirements reflecting management intentions and "best practices." This paper proposes a workaround design system (WDS) for anticipating, designing, and/or preventing workarounds that bypass systems as designed. A WDS includes a process and an interactive "workaround design tool" (WDT) for identifying and evaluating foreseeable workarounds based on work system theory and a theory of workarounds. This paper summarizes the conceptual background and explains the form, use, and implications of the proposed WDS and WDT. The idea of WDS addresses significant gaps in practice and research. Designers should have methods for identifying likely obstacles and anticipating and evaluating a non-trivial percentage of plausible workarounds. Methods for identifying workarounds might help in training work system participants. Researchers might use WDS to explore why specific responses to obstacles did or did not occur. The lack of methods related to anticipating, designing or preventing workarounds implies that WDS may prove fruitful even though it is impossible to anticipate all possible workarounds.

Workarounds as generative mechanisms for bottom‐up process innovation—Insights from a multiple case study

“…Although on an individual level, workarounds are usually perceived as positive deviations, since they enable employees to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their work, on an organisational level they can have both positive and negative consequences (Alojairi, 2017; Pinto et al, 2018). On the positive side, they can be a source of improvement and creativity, or they can mitigate inefficiencies, obstacles, and anomalies (Alter, 2015). On the negative side, the repercussion of workarounds (Barrett, 2018) in an organisation can result in a loss of control or revenue, in errors, inefficiencies, compliance problems, data breach, or inferior process quality (Alter, 2015; Boudreau & Robey, 2005; Hunt & Jackson, 2010; Wibisono et al, 2020).…”

The Effect of Unmet Expectations of Information Quality on Post-Acceptance Workarounds among Healthcare Providers

“…The obstacle may be shortcomings in the system or workflow, but training and policies also can affect the way that users ultimately use an IS. Although users may create a quicker or more efficient way of using the system, generally, workarounds are considered hazardous and opportunistic, noncompliant behavior that undermines management intentions [34]. In the healthcare context and the information quality domain, workarounds are generally triggered by shortcomings of the EHR system's ability to capture or provide the needed information [35,36] among responses to operational failures and workflow restraints [37,38].…”

Why do business processes deviate? Results from a Delphi study

“…The literature on process deviance can be split into three groups. The first group aims to conceptualize process deviance and to classify related concepts, e.g., workarounds (Rinderle and Reichert 2006;Weber et al 2006;Alter 2015a). The second group focuses on the detection (ex post view) and runtime prediction (ex nunc view) of process deviance.…”