Workarounds and shadow IT – balancing innovation and risk

Abstract

A significant amount of research has been carried out into the way in which employees use workarounds and shadow IT to cope with the complexity of enterprise applications. There is a similar situation in the use of clinical record applications. However neither qualitative or quantitative survey techniques give any indication of the scale of the adoption of workarounds. In both enterprise and clinical settings workarounds can either introduce a substantial element of corporate risk or provide a basis for process innovation. The research that has been carried out primarily focuses on data-rich processes and little attention has been given to workarounds in a digital workplace where the processes may be significantly more complex that in enterprise data processes