IT workaround practices: Motivations and expectations

Abstract

An interesting phenomenon that has received limited attention in the literature is the concept of workaround practices in the field of IT and their use in organizations adopting ERP solutions. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of workaround strategy by examining the main reasons behind it. The "Echo" method was used to evaluate the comments that participants provided regarding their ERP system task-related interactions, i.e., helpful, not-so-helpful behaviors, and workaround strategies used to handle the not-so-helpful situations. In "the Company's" case, the organizational Interaction Effectiveness (IE) ratio of 0.24 can be used as a baseline to determine the relative effectiveness of different interactions. The categorization process of the qualitative data revealed that "Reliability" (55%) received the highest number of helpful comments while "Flexibility" (44%) received the highest number of not-so-helpful comments.