EXPLAINING THE INFLUENCE OF WORKAROUNDS ON EFFECTIVE USE – THE CASE OF A SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

The stage of post-adoption of an enterprise system (ES) implementation has been in the focus of recent information systems research. However, a thorough understanding of how users effectively use an enterprise system to complete their tasks is still missing. Prior research has implied that adaptive use is of great importance to facilitate effective use of a system. We investigate adaptive use solutions, which are outside the original system. This behavior is known as workaround. We conduct an interpretive case study to investigate the impact of workarounds and explain why workarounds can lead to an advance in effective use of a standard ES. We expand the theory of effective use with an explanation why workarounds can improve transparent interaction, representation fidelity and informed action via alleviating users’ issues with the surface structure and the faithfulness in representations of an implemented standard ES

Fostering Organizational Learning: The Impact of Work Design on Workarounds, Errors, and Speaking Up about Internal Supply Chain Problems

A potential avenue for organizational learning is frontline employees’ experience with internal supply chain problems. However, extensive research has established that employees rarely speak up to managers about problems. They tend to work around problems without additional effort to create organizational learning. This paper tests the premise that managerial action, via work design, can alter this dynamic. We use laboratory experiments to test the impact of three work design variables on proactive, improvement-oriented behaviors, workarounds, and errors. We find that two out of the three work design variables were effective at inducing proactive improvement-oriented behavior. Our results suggest that small changes in job design can reduce employee silence about organizational problems. Furthermore, we test the impact of the variables on risky workarounds and errors to account for unanticipated negative effects of work design to facilitate speaking up

Organizational Factors that Contribute to Operational Failures in Hospitals

The performance gap between hospital spending and outcomes is indicative of inefficient care delivery. Operational failures—breakdowns in internal supply chains that prevent work from being completed—contribute to inefficiency by consuming 10% of nurses’ time (Hendrich et al. 2008, Tucker 2004). This paper seeks to identify organizational factors associated with operational failures, with a goal of providing insight into effective strategies for removal. We observed nurses on medical/ surgical units at two hospitals, shadowed support staff who provided materials, and interviewed employees about their internal supply chain’s performance. These activities created a database of 120 operational failures and the organizational factors that contributed to them. We found that employees believed their department’s performance was satisfactory, but poorly trained employees in other departments caused the failures. However, only 14% of the operational failures arose from errors or training. They stemmed instead from multiple organizationally-driven factors: insufficient workspace (29%), poor process design (23%), and a lack of integration in the internal supply chains (23%). Our findings thus suggest that employees are unlikely to discern the role that their department’s routines play in operational failures, which hinders solution efforts. Furthermore, in contrast to the “Pareto Principle” which advocates addressing “large” problems that contribute a disproportionate share of the cumulative negative impact of problems, the failures and causes were dispersed over a wide range of factors. Thus, removing failures will require deliberate cross-functional efforts to redesign workspaces and processes so they are better integrated with patients’ needs

The Role of Workarounds in Benefits Realisation: Evidence from a Field Study in Saudi Arabia

Recent studies show that more than half of Saudi Arabian (SA) organisations fail to realise business benefits from their IS investments. This has been largely attributed to the contextual misalignment between information technologies and the needs of developing countries. In the IS literature on benefits realisation, the application of benefits dependency networks (BDN), have been established as being helpful in improving IS projects outcomes. This research investigates current IT development practice in SMEs in Saudi Arabia and reports on some of the challenges that these businesses need to overcome to achieve benefits from their IT investments. Evidence from the literature and a field study suggests that workarounds are widely used when implementing new IT, particularly to facilitate the continuation of embedded cultural practices. The paper argues that integrating the Theory of Workarounds into frameworks for benefits realisation would offer a useful conceptualisation of IT implementation practice to support businesses in developing countries such as Saudi Arabia to improve outcomes when investing in IT

Designed for Workarounds: A Qualitative Study of the Causes of Operational Failures in Hospitals

Frontline care providers in hospitals spend at least 10% of their time working around operational failures, which are situations where information, supplies, or equipment needed for patient care are insufficient. However, little is known about underlying causes of operational failures and what hospitals can do to reduce their occurrence. To address this gap, we examined the internal supply chains at two hospitals with the aim of discovering organizational factors that contribute to operational failures. We conducted in-depth qualitative research, including observations and interviews of over 80 individuals from 4 nursing units and the ancillary support departments that provide equipment and supplies needed for patient care. We found that a lack of interconnectedness among interdependent departments' routines was a major source of operational failures. The low levels of interconnectedness occurred because of how the internal supply chains were designed and managed rather than because of employee error or a shortfall in training. Thus, we propose that the time that hospital staff spend on workarounds can be reduced through deliberate efforts to increase interconnectedness among hospitals' internal supply departments. Four dimensions of interconnectedness include (1) hospital-level—rather than department-level—performance measures; (2) internal supply department routines that respond to specific patients' needs rather than to predetermined stocking routines; (3) knowledge that is necessary for efficient handoffs of materials is translated across departmental boundaries; and (4) cross-departmental collaboration mechanisms that enable improvement in the flow of materials across departmental boundaries

Understanding Behavioral Sources of Process Variation Following Enterprise System Deployment

This paper extends the current understanding of the time-sensitivity of intent and usage following large-scale IT implementation. Our study focuses on perceived system misfit with organizational processes in tandem with the availability of system circumvention opportunities. Case study comparisons and controlled experiments are used to support the theoretical unpacking of organizational and technical contingencies and their relationship to shifts in user intentions and variation in work-processing tactics over time. Findings suggest that managers and users may retain strong intentions to circumvent systems in the presence of perceived task-technology misfit. The perceived ease with which this circumvention is attainable factors significantly into the timeframe within which it is attempted, and subsequently impacts the onset of deviation from prescribed practice and anticipated dynamics

How Information Systems Evolve by and for Use

Few studies have examined dynamic interactions between IT change and organizational change during information system evolution (ISE). We propose a dynamic model of ISE which characterizes ISE related change in four dimensions: 1) planned, 2) improvised, 3) organizational, and 4) IT related. The model- generated inductively through theory-building case studies - enables us narrate a more comprehensive explanation of ISE over time- in particular how such evolution is orchestrated by both planned and improvised change, which tacks between technical and organizational modifications. The model thus recognizes dynamic interactions between organizational and IT change by showing how incremental/improvised changes in IT or organizational processes evolve into pervasive and permanent change when organizations institutionalize these improvisations into new permanent IT designs and revised organizational routines. We demonstrate the analytical value of the proposed evolution model by investigating ISE processes in two manufacturing organizations implementing the same inter-organizational system over a period of two years. This multi-site case study research allows us to more systematically characterize significant socio-technical changes triggered by user improvisation. Our model and associated empirical analysis moves explorations of organizational and IT change towards a more unified understanding of how both mutually affect the form, function and evolution of the other

A Work System Perspective on Adoption Entities, Adoption Processes, and Post-Adoption Compliance and Noncompliance

This conceptual contribution responds to the invitation to the DIGIT 2015 Call for Papers “to reflect on and move forward from the dominant stream of research work on technology acceptance.” The dominant stream of research is basically about antecedents and correlates of adoption and continuation of use for hardware/software artifacts. This paper uses work system theory and several of its extensions to identify directions for adoption research that have been realized partially, but not nearly to the extent possible. It focuses on three general issues: 1) what adoption means in the context of work systems, 2) how adoption occurs, and 3) how adoption entities change after adoption, including decisions by work system participants about whether and how to comply or not comply with prescribed practices that are often taken-for-granted as the result of adoption processes

A Proposed Theoretical Foundation for the Information Systems Discipline (version 1. 1)

“Rethink the theoretical foundations of the IS discipline” is one of the grand challenges for IS research identified in a Delphi study in Business Information Systems Engineering (Becker et al., 2015). This draft addresses that challenge directly through an integrated approach to the operation and evolution of systems. Almost any attempt to articulate a theoretical foundation for IS (a TFIS) would need to cover that topic although other attempts might emphasize other topics and other viewpoints. The proposed Theoretical Foundation for IS (TFIS) has three main goals: 1) Integration. Build outward from an integrated core. Do not accept the excuse that the IS field is not ready for a serious attempt at integration. 2) Usefulness. Contribute to describing, analyzing, designing, and evaluating systems, developing new tools and methods, and supporting empirical IS research. 3) Near-symmetry. Treat sociotechnical systems (with human participants) and totally automated systems as similarly as possible. Trends toward digitalization, automation, AI, and robotics imply benefits from that type of near-symmetry for understanding changes in the “division of labor.

Education and Training as Part of an Expeditionary Combat Support System Implementation Strategy

One current venture of the United States Air Force (USAF) is the implementation of the largest ever single-instance of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This project, dubbed Enterprise Combat Support System (ECSS), has the potential to integrate the USAF worldwide supply chain and make transparent the currently cloudy connections between parts, people and processes. Unfortunately, ERP implementations are rife with potential problems and there is no guarantee of successfully implementing ECSS unless the USAF properly manages these problems. One problem area the USAF must manage is ERP education and training. According to the literature, this area is consistently underestimated. In addition, the education and training success factors are hard to identify and none of the reviewed literature contained a synthesis of these factors. The intent of this study is to help overcome this problem by first identifying the potential education and training success factors. Then, using a multiple case study methodology, the study empirically tests how well the identified factors compare to the methods used by companies implementing an ERP system. Finally, the study compares the proposed USAF ECSS end user training plan to these findings to identify potential problems and help develop recommendations for the implementation team