Content uploaded by Pnina Soffer
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Pnina Soffer on Apr 19, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
Workarounds in Business Processes: a Goal-based
Analysis
Nesi Outmazgin, Pnina Soffer and Irit Hadar
University of Haifa, Mount Carmel 3498838, Haifa, Israel
nesi@zefat.ac.il, spnina@is.haifa.ac.il, hadari@is.haifa.ac.il
Abstract. Workarounds in business processes and information systems (IS) have
attracted research attention in recent years. Deviating from official processes,
workarounds are goal-driven adaptations. Understanding the underlying prob-
lems or perceived barriers that motivate workarounds is essential for suggesting
appropriate solutions which would lead to process and IS improvement. The
premise taken in this paper is that workarounds are often motivated by misalign-
ments between organizational goals, goals of local-units and actors, and the busi-
ness process that should realize these goals. With this premise, we propose an i*-
based analysis for identifying such misalignments that are associated to worka-
rounds. We report an industrial case study that demonstrates the analysis and
associates workarounds with the underlying misalignments. Improvement rec-
ommendations that were made following the analysis have been accepted by the
organization and are currently being implemented.
Keywords: Business process workarounds, improvement opportunities, goal
misalignment analysis, case study, i*.
1 Introduction
Workarounds in business processes and information systems are a common phenome-
non in practice, which has recently received considerable research attention. According
to Alter [1], a workaround is “a goal-driven adaptation, improvisation, or other change
to one or more aspects of an existing work system in order to overcome, bypass, or
minimize the impact of obstacles, exceptions, anomalies, mishaps, established prac-
tices, management expectations, or structural constraints that are perceived as prevent-
ing that work system or its participants from achieving a desired level of efficiency,
effectiveness, or other organizational or personal goals.” This definition, however, is
very broad, tying together quick fixes of technology mishaps, shadow IT systems, and
deviations from the required course of action in business processes.
In this paper we specifically address workarounds in business processes. While gen-
erally adopting Alter’s definition of workarounds, we focus on workarounds in business
processes that deviate from the official process specification, but are nonetheless per-
formed while pursuing the process goal. As an example, consider a purchasing process
where an order is issued before all the required approvals are obtained. This is clearly
2
a deviation from the official process, requiring an order to be issued only once all ap-
provals have been given. Yet, the goal of the process (purchasing required goods) is
pursued. Nevertheless, while technology-oriented workarounds (quick fixes, shadow
IT) are often considered positively as creative and innovative solutions to existing prob-
lems, workarounds in business processes, even when promoting process goals, are typ-
ically considered negatively, as a form of intentional non-compliance, which can also
harm achieving other important organizational goals as a result of focusing exclusively
on one particular goal.
Business processes are designed and practiced for the purpose of standardizing,
streamlining, and managing collaborative work across different units in an organiza-
tional system, thus promoting the achievement of business goals [7] [8]. Compliance
with the required process is important for several reasons. First, since business pro-
cesses often apply to different organizational units, standardization is an enabler of col-
laboration. When a process participant does not act as expected, the work of others
along the process may be hampered. Second, processes frequently reflect obligations
to external parties that must be met, regulations that must be complied with, and stand-
ards the organization is committed to. Last, business processes are designed to support
the organization’s goals, and non-compliance may impose risks and negatively impact
business performance.
Our premise, which follows Alter’s definition of workarounds, is that workarounds
are performed for a reason, and are driven by underlying problems and limitations in
the process or in the information system, the perceptions of employees, or that of their
management. Analyzing and understanding the motivation behind workaround deci-
sions may hence reveal their root causes and lead to targeted improvement solutions.
Process improvement based on workarounds has been suggested in the past (e.g., [6]
[20]), but these suggestions focused on adopting the workarounds as part of the formal
procedures. Evidently, when workarounds are associated with risks and other negative
consequences, such adoption is not desirable. Our approach differs from previous ones
in proposing a systematic goal-based analysis with the aim of revealing the problems
that motivate workarounds. Improvement should be achieved by addressing these prob-
lems rather than by adopting the workarounds. Our proposed analysis is anchored in
motivational theories and based on previous empirical findings. We demonstrate the
analysis through an industrial case study.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides background
and related work about workarounds and relevant motivational theories. Section 3 de-
scribes our proposed analysis approach using i* models, which is demonstrated in a
case study reported in Section 4. Section 5 provides a concluding discussion concerning
the approach and the case study.
2 Workarounds and goal misalignment
2.1 Related work on workarounds
Workarounds have been studied quite extensively in recent years, in different contexts
and from different point of views. Ferneley & Sobreperez [5] suggested classifying
3
workarounds as “harmless,” “hindrance,” or “essential.” Determining which class is
suitable, however, might differ depending on one’s perspective and also reflects local
considerations rather than organizational ones. Wilkin & Davern [20] show examples
of workarounds that solve problems at an operational perspective but have harmful re-
sults at a managerial one. Recognizing this, Röder et al. [10] investigated the factors
that managers weigh when deciding whether to tolerate workarounds. The findings re-
veal that managers consider the trade-off between possible benefits and risks resulting
from the workarounds, before deciding whether to tolerate them.
Specific attention has been given to workarounds in healthcare and nursing pro-
cesses, where rigid processes are sometimes impossible to follow [6]. For example,
Beerepoot et al. [3] suggests criteria for accepting workarounds in healthcare processes
as the formal practice or rejecting them. Still, workarounds have been observed in pro-
cesses of various domains. Outmazgin & Soffer [13] [14] identified generic mecha-
nisms by which workarounds are performed in business processes and derived patterns
for detecting workarounds using process mining techniques.
In general, workarounds have been described in the literature as a goal-seeking be-
havior, motivated by perceived obstacles on the way to some desired goal [1]. Specifi-
cally concerning business processes, researchers (e.g., [15]) indicated that workarounds
may occur when the prescribed procedures require additional effort of users and this
effort is perceived as extraneous to their perceived goals. A related theme is of misfit
or misalignment. Goal misalignment is mentioned as a possible source in the theory of
workarounds [1]. Malaurent & Avison [9] describe workarounds in an internationally
distributed organization, motivated by misalignment between headquarter intentions
and the needs of local branches and subsidiary companies. Misfit as a source of work-
arounds, specifically in the context of ERP systems and the processes they support, was
highlighted by [17] [18], and others.
2.2 Organizational vs. local-unit goals
Business process management emphasizes a cross-organizational perception, guided by
the aim to standardize and prescribe end-to-end procedures, as opposed to local func-
tional “silos” [7]. Transforming employees’ “siloed” perception into a cross-organiza-
tional one is considered one of the challenges associated with BPM implementation in
an organization [7], while naturally the main and immediate commitment of employees
is to their local unit [16]. Ideally, the goals of each local unit in the organization should
be derived from global organizational goals, and realized through the corresponding
business processes, all aligned with each other, as illustrated in Fig. 1.
However, very often misalignment among these elements exists or is perceived to
exist for various reasons. Misalignment between organizational and local unit goals
may occur when trade-off relations exist among goals, and goals set for specific local
units are not highly weighed in the overall organizational perspective. For example, a
specific local unit may have a goal to quickly respond and fulfill its tasks as fast as
possible, while an overall consideration would also take costs into account, thus limit
overtime work. Employees are typically well aware of and committed to the immediate
4
goals of their local unit, and might not be aware of the full scope of considerations at
the organizational level.
Fig. 1. An aligned goal-process triangle.
Misalignment between local goals and the process is inevitable when the goals of
the local unit and of the organization are not aligned, and the process is designed to
realize organizational goals. With the local goals in mind, the process is perceived as
an obstacle, and this motivates a workaround. A different case would be when the pro-
cess is not aligned with the local unit goals nor with organizational goals, leading to the
conclusion that it is simply not well designed. We note, however, that employees act
upon their perceptions, and might not be aware of the full rationale of the processes. A
case where the process is aligned with the local unit goal but not with organizational
goals is also possible, although less prevalent.
Our premise in this paper is that the misalignments between the elements presented
in Fig. 1 drive workaround intentions. In what follows, we propose to systematically
analyze goals and processes and thereby reveal misalignments using goal models.
3 Using goal models for misalignment detection
The three elements of the goal-process triangle can be captured using i* models [4]
[21], and conflicts among elements as potential drivers of workarounds can be ana-
lyzed. However, to accomplish a consistent representation, some adjustments of the
modeling are needed. In i*, the Strategic Dependency (SD) model provides a high-level
representation of the actor interactions in the process, and enables understanding their
dependency connections and the high-level goals that drive them. This understanding
can support an examination of where the Strategic Rationale (SR) model should focus.
The SR model focuses on specific actors and enables analyzing their goals and tasks,
as well as positive and negative contributions among these elements. In our terms, the
actors stand for local units. Since our aim is to capture conflicts between organizational
goals, local unit goals, and prescribed processes, we propose the following modeling
guidelines to ensure these elements are captured in the model in a consistent manner.
Organizational goals
Local-unit goals
Processes
Derivation
Realization
Realization
5
(1) Organizational goals and derived (local) goals: For each actor, we consider the
root goal(s) as organizational goals, assigned to the actors by virtue of their role
in the organization. Local-unit goals are derived from the root goal of the actor
and are presented inside its boundaries. In i* SR models, these goals can appear
as intentional goals or quality goals (ovals and clouds, respectively), as shown
in Fig. 2.
(2) Dependency goals: Each actor can have additional goals that emerge from the
dependency connections with other actors. These goals support or help to
achieve organizational goals primarily assigned to the other actors. In i* SR
models, these goals are related to tasks or goals of the dependee actor, and are
represented as derived dependency goals, as shown in Fig. 2.
(3) Tasks: All tasks presented in the i* model are intended to realize the actor goals,
both goals that are derived from dependency connections with other actors, and
those that are directly derived from higher-level goals of the actor and can thus
be viewed as “local”.
Fig. 2. Example of an i* model showing derivation of goals.
Since some of the derived goals and tasks of each actor stem from the actor’s “own”
goals (derived from organizational goals assigned to the actor), while other goals and
tasks are derived from dependency relations, they are not necessarily well aligned with
each other. For detecting and analyzing goal misalignment in the model, the focus
should be on the negative contributions (e.g., Break or Hurt) of the goals and tasks. In
fact, dependency connections with other actors create “pulling forces” on the actor in
conflicting directions. The example in Fig. 3 illustrates goal misalignment detection.
As shown in the example presented in Fig. 3, the faculty head (actor 1) depends on
the lecturer (actor 2), who needs to perform a task for realizing this goal. However, the
lecturer has a quality goal "Flexibility with syllabus building" that is hampered by this
task. The quality goal is likely derived from other goals (e.g., organizational goal – the
root goal) or from dependency relations with other actors. In this example, the task
creates a negative contribution (break) to the quality goal, so there is a misalignment
between the dependency goal, realized by the task, and the local quality goal.
6
Fig. 3. Example of misalignment due to dependency relations between actors.
4 Case study
4.1 Setting and method
We demonstrate the proposed analysis approach through a case study, following the
guidelines of interpretive case study research for understanding phenomena through the
research participants’ interpretation [12]. The case study was performed in a large or-
ganization operating in the domains of telecommunication, IT services, and information
security. This organization employs approximately 1500 employees and is a part of a
globally operating corporation that has 5300 employees. The process on which we fo-
cus is sales forecast based on price proposals, which is a cross-organizational process,
involving many actors and departments, and is essential for the ongoing operations of
the organization. It deals with creation, management and approval of price proposals
before they can be sent to the customers. The main considerations include the profita-
bility rate, business rules, and solution building for the customers. In addition to crea-
tion and approval of price proposals, the process deals with a variety of pre-sales activ-
ities. Ultimately, it serves for communicating opportunities and expected business deals
as an operational forecast the management uses for long-term planning. The process is
supported by a dedicated information system that was locally developed. It is related to
other processes, such as customers sales management and purchase ordering.
We collected data through semi-structured interviews [19] with eight stakeholders
of different operational and managerial roles, whose experience in the organization
ranged from three to 21 years. The interviews focused on the processes as viewed by
the interviewees, related goals and tasks, improvement opportunities, and workarounds
that are performed (see interview guide in Table 1). We complemented the interviews
by collecting documents regarding formal procedures and processes, ISO work proce-
dures and reports, and by carefully studying the information system, its user interface,
functionality, and database schema.
The interviews took 45-90 minutes each, and were conducted in the offices of the
organization. All the interviews were audio recorded and transcribed, and in addition,
phone calls and emails were exchanged after the interviews to obtain additional expla-
nations and further validation of the interview transcripts. Following the interviews, we
created a BPMN model of the process for gaining a comprehensive understanding of
7
its flow and rules, and presented the model to the interviewees for approval. The BPMN
served as an input for the detailed analysis.
Table 1. Guiding questions for the semi-structured interviews
Interview questions
Goal
Used for
Organization and process
Describe your role and area of responsibil-
ity in the organization.
Background and introduction.
Background
knowledge
In your opinion, does the organization fol-
low clear work procedures and standards
like ISO, SOX, JCI? Are they implemented
as expected?
To understand commitments
to legal and external proce-
dures, policies, and regula-
tions.
Background
knowledge
In your opinion, how are organizational and
procedural changes managed and accepted?
To uncover change manage-
ment issues, fixed paradigms
and resistance to changes.
Background
knowledge
What are the organization’s core processes?
For each process state: is it departmental,
cross-organizational or global?
To assess the studied process
and examine its scope and
boundaries.
Background
knowledge
Describe the process from your viewpoint.
What would you suggest in order to im-
prove the process? Do you think the IS con-
tributes to the effectiveness and efficiency
of the process? Please elaborate.
To learn the process.
To elicit goals sought by im-
provement ideas.
To uncover misalignments be-
tween the as-is process and
the perceived goals.
- BPMN
model
- i* model
- Conflict
identifica-
tion
What is your role in the process? Do you
think your areas of responsibility in the pro-
cess fit your area of expertise? How so?
To elicit Actor boundaries,
tasks, goals and dependencies.
To elicit workarounds, possi-
bly those related to expertise.
- BPMN
model
- i* model
- Worka-
rounds list
Do you think that other process participants
exceed their responsibility areas? How so?
To uncover workarounds per-
formed by others.
Worka-
rounds list
Is there manual work in the process?
Where?
To uncover difficulties in the
process and workarounds.
Worka-
rounds list
Participant’s perceptions of goals and possible misalignments
From your point of view, what are the or-
ganizational goals the process is intended to
achieve? Were the process goals presented
or explained to you?
To uncover perceived organi-
zational goals.
Possibly, to elicit related
workarounds.
- i* model
- Worka-
rounds list
What are the main goals you are expected to
achieve as part of your role? In what ways
are others involved and contribute to
achieving these goals?
To uncover perceived local-
unit goals.
To learn the dependency rela-
tions among the actors.
- i* model
- Conflict
identifica-
tion
What are the tasks you need to perform alt-
hough they do not contribute directly to the
goals you are expected to accomplish? Why
do you need to perform them?
To elicit perceived misalign-
ments between goals and
tasks.
To uncover motivation for
workarounds.
- i* model
- Conflict
identifica-
tion
Are there known and defined KPIs for the
process? Are they measured on a personal
or organizational level?
To elicit quality goals.
i* model
8
Are there certain situations that justify per-
forming actions other than what is required
in the process?
To examine and learn goal
misalignment situations in a
detailed manner.
To elicit workarounds.
- Conflict
identifica-
tion
- Worka-
rounds list
In your opinion, does the official process
include all the tasks required to accomplish
your goals? If not, what do you think is
missing?
To uncover perceived obsta-
cles, gaps and technological
barriers in the process.
To identify process improve-
ment opportunities.
- Worka-
rounds list
- Conflict
identifica-
tion
In general, are you satisfied with the pro-
cess? Would you suggest other ways of
achieving the relevant goals?
To examine improvement
ideas, including those already
performed informally (as
workarounds).
Worka-
rounds list
Workarounds in the process
In your opinion, what is a business process
workaround? Do you think management
would define it similarly? If not, how do
you think they would define it?
To assess perceptions about
management view of worka-
rounds.
Background
knowledge
Are you familiar with workarounds that are
performed in the process? If so, in which
situations and how often? How are they
identified?
To examine and learn worka-
rounds in a detailed manner,
their frequencies and the im-
pact to the organization.
Worka-
rounds list
Why, in your opinion, are these worka-
rounds performed? Do these workarounds
help participants in accomplishing their
goals? Do you think that these workarounds
help to accomplish organizational goals?
To learn the motivation for
process workarounds.
To relate the misalignment sit-
uations to specific worka-
rounds.
- Worka-
rounds list
- Conflict
identifica-
tion
What do you think are the consequences of
these workarounds? What would happen if
they cannot be performed?
To elicit perceived impacts of
workarounds.
Conflict
identifica-
tion
Do you think that the process workarounds
are related to obstacles of any kind? Do you
think that with a more flexible process they
would still be performed?
To understand the motivation
for performing workarounds
To examine process improve-
ments \ opportunities.
Conflict
identifica-
tion
In your opinion, are workarounds per-
formed regularly? Do they require skills or
deep familiarity with the process?
To clarify the motivation and
the effort involved in worka-
rounds.
Worka-
rounds list
Text analysis and interpretation of the transcribed interviews were performed to
identify the process goals as perceived by the interviewees, gradually constructing goal
and dependency diagrams. In particular, conflicts and misalignments were sought be-
tween the identified goals and between the goals and the process, as depicted in the
validated BPMN. This was done following the guidelines outlined in Section 3. In par-
allel, we listed the workarounds reported in the interviews. Following our assumption
of correlation between workarounds and misalignments, we used the list of worka-
rounds as triangulation for the identified misalignments, and iterated to reveal addi-
tional misalignments that could be related to the reported workarounds. Last, we pro-
9
posed solution directions for the identified misalignments and presented them for eval-
uation to the director of procedures and methods, pre-sale department manager, and
sales department manager.
4.2 Goal misalignment detection
According to the approach presented in Section 3, we first created the SD model of the
sales forecast process for understanding the dependencies between the actors and the
main organizational goal pursued by each of them, and then we zoomed into the SR
model to examine and focus on the misalignment detection.
As shown in the SD model in Fig. 4, the customer manager is the main actor of the
sales forecast process, and hence a detailed SR model was created for this actor. The
main goal of this actor is to promote sales according to the sales targets. This is done
while creating the price proposal, gradually building the solution offering with the re-
lated part numbers and specification, service agreement, and a full “proposal kit.” Every
detail needs to be approved through an approval round by several role holders, until a
customer commitment to purchase the content of the price proposal is received.
Fig. 4. SD model of the sales forecast process.
10
To execute this process, the customer manager has two directions of dependencies
with other actors. In one direction, the customer manager depends on other actors (e.g.,
the approvers, the service provider). The second direction is where other actors depend
on the customer manager (e.g., management, service agreements department).
Due to space limitations, we cannot show and discuss the details of the entire SR
model. Rather, we focus here on two relatively simple examples to illustrate the analy-
sis approach. The first example illustrates a goal misalignment related to local goals
derived from the dependencies with external actors, and the second example illustrates
a goal misalignment related to local goals derived from their root goal. In both examples
the misalignment is between those goals and the goals of the external actor through the
dependencies, as follows:
Fig. 5. Example A.
(1) Goal misalignment was detected between the "Achieve high sales targets per-
formance" and "Obtain a real picture of the expected sales for planning" goals.
In Fig. 5, the dependency of the management actor for the goal "Obtain a real
picture of the expected sales for planning" relates to the goal "Progress price
proposals" of the customer manager, since when price proposals are entered and
progressed in the IS, they are visible to management and serve as an indication
of expected future sales. However, the model shows a negative contribution
(break) to the goal "Achieve high sales target performance". The explanation is
that sales target performance is measured based on the rate of price proposals,
which are realized as sales orders. To achieve high sales target performance, the
customer manager needs to enter price proposals only towards the closing of a
11
deal, when they are almost certain to lead to an actual sale. In addition, the reg-
ular approval rounds associated with progressing price proposals may delay the
process, and reduce sales performance, as seen by the hurt relation between “Get
approval” and “Achieve high sales target performance”.
Fig. 6. Example B.
(2) Goal misalignment was detected between the goal "Avoid sending unapproved
proposals" and the goals "Respond quickly and flexibly" and "Satisfy the cus-
tomer" goals. In Fig. 6, the dependency of the management actor for the goal
"Avoid sending unapproved price proposals" relates to the task "Send the ap-
proved price proposal to the customer" of the customer manager. This leads to
a negative contribution to two goals: it hurts the "Satisfy the customer" goal and
breaks the "Respond quickly and flexibly" goal. This is because of the require-
ment of management to only send to the customers price proposals that com-
pleted the approval round, both for new price proposals and for each change in
the proposal introduced after its approval. As a result, the customer manager
cannot respond quickly and the satisfaction of the customers can be reduced.
4.3 Workarounds
As described in Section 4.1, we collected workarounds independent of the misalign-
ment analysis, and looked for connections between workarounds and misalignments.
Eventually we could associate each of the workarounds with one or more of the identi-
fied misalignments, and vice versa. We demonstrate this for the misalignment examples
presented above:
Example A - Workaround description: the customer manager creates a new price
proposal in the IS only after closing the deal with the customer. Specifically, all nego-
tiations with the customers are done unofficially without any record in the IS. Only
after receiving a signed purchase order from the customer does the customer manager
start the process of creating a price proposal and getting all the required approvals.
Evidently, the customer manager works around the process and gets a post-factum ap-
proval for the price proposal.
12
Underlying misalignment: between the goals to achieve high sales target perfor-
mance measures and to manage and progress the price proposals, which, in turn, sup-
ports the management goal to have a forecast of potential sales ahead of time in order
to plan for it. The sales target performance is based on the price proposals which actu-
ally materialize into a sales order. Hence, the customer manager is not motivated to
report unclosed deals.
Result: price proposals that are still in process, before closure, do not exist in the IS
and so they cannot be considered by management for planning, i.e., management actor’s
goal to obtain a real picture of the expected sales for planning purposes is hampered.
Example B - Workaround description: the customer manager prepares and sends
price proposals to customers manually, before they exist in the IS. The customer man-
ager uses Word documents or Excel spreadsheets and sends them to the customers di-
rectly in regular email, and so these actions are not documented in the IS.
Underlying misalignment: between the goals of the customer manager to respond
quickly and flexibly and to satisfy the customer and the task (official process) of send-
ing price proposals only after they are approved. If the customer manager waits for an
approval for each new price proposal as well as for each change in the proposal intro-
duced after its approval, the quick and flexible response goals would not be achieved,
and customer’s satisfaction might be reduced.
Result: harm can be caused for the organization by sending unapproved price pro-
posals that might create commitment to unprofitable or risky deals.
4.4 Improvement opportunities
Using the goal models and identifying their correspondence to reported workarounds,
we were able to reveal various misalignments and understand how they drive worka-
round situations. This understanding can be leveraged and yield improvement opportu-
nities for the business process. Based on the examples above, the following improve-
ments were suggested to the organization:
(1) Changing the measures used for assessment of the sales performance – as the
customer managers are currently evaluated for sales target performance in a way
that motivates them to avoid entering price proposals to the IS until closure of
all the details of the deal. Therefore, the suggestion is to change the measures
of the sales target performance to ones that would eliminate the conflict between
high sales performance (calculated based on the percentage of materialized price
proposals) and managing the price proposals in the IS. For example, changing
the measure to reflect the number of sales opportunities, sales activities or po-
tential sales income can motivate the customer managers to enter price pro-
posals as soon as possible and manage them through the IS, resulting in align-
ment between the sales performance goal and that of documenting and progress-
ing price proposals in the IS. In addition, the measure can also consider custom-
ers’ billing rate, to motivate the customer managers to supervise price proposals
all the way down to ordering and payment.
(2) Reducing the strictness of the procedure of approvals and approval rounds. We
propose to do this in two ways. First, by introducing threshold conditions for
13
the amount and the profitability rate of the price proposals that require approval.
This would increase the degree of freedom for the customer managers and ena-
ble a quick processing of small price proposals. Second, by introducing several
different approval trails that can be selected according to price proposal amounts
and the profitability rate, and considering whether this is a new price proposal
or a change in an existing one. Currently, each price proposal for any amount
requires the same approval round and the same approvals hierarchy. Our sug-
gestion is to offer a shorter and quicker route for proposals or changes that are
of relatively low risk (new proposals of small amounts or small changes of ap-
proved proposals). These suggestions can significantly increase the flexibility
of the customer managers in the negotiation with the customers and shorten re-
sponse times, thus increasing the customer satisfaction level. The task would
change to sending prices proposals according to the approval policy, and this
would still be aligned with the management goal of avoiding sending unap-
proved proposals while introducing minimal delay to this process.
The suggested improvement ideas and the relevant goal misalignment situations were
presented in the case study organization to the director of procedures and methods, the
pre-sale department manager, and the sales department manager. The suggestions were
discussed in the organization and approved as an improvement plan. Currently these
improvements are being implemented in the organization.
5 Concluding discussion
In this paper, we have shown how workarounds in business processes can be analyzed
systematically using goal models, and how this analysis can reveal the underlying prob-
lems that motivate workarounds. Thus, this analysis can lead to targeted and ongoing
process improvement.
Earlier suggestions have been made to utilize workaround information for process
improvement (e.g., [6] [20]). These, however, mostly suggested to adopt the worka-
round as a formal procedure when appropriate. In contrast, we aim to reveal the prob-
lems and, specifically, the perceived misalignments that drive the workaround inten-
tion, and to solve them. Addressing the problems directly may yield other solutions,
which may be more beneficial or less risky than the workarounds that are taken.
Our analysis differs from previously suggested analysis approaches, which typically
focused on the workarounds themselves. Examples include [2] and [3], where worka-
rounds are studied and analyzed for determining whether they are acceptable as an of-
ficial process, and [10], where responses of managers to workarounds are considered.
In [11] workarounds are represented as designated parts in process models so they can
be visualized and recognized, but not in relation to their sources.
In contrast, we focus on the conflicts and misalignments underlying existing work-
arounds, using the well-established i* model. With this we gain another advantage –
the information needed for constructing a goal model is easier to obtain than infor-
mation concerning workarounds. Employees are likely to be much more cooperative
regarding their goals and actions than regarding workarounds they perform.
14
The reported case study demonstrates how misalignment of goals and processes can
be recognized in an i* model and associated with workarounds that are performed in
the process. The guidelines we suggested for the creation of the i* model are intended
to enable a consistent representation of how local goals and tasks are derived from or-
ganizational goals and from dependencies among actors for realizing these goals. The
interview guide that was used is generic and can be used in similar projects. We further
demonstrate how improvement suggestions can be made when specifically addressing
the revealed misalignments. The specific suggestions we made have been evaluated in
the case study organization and found adequate to the extent that they are currently
being implemented. This indicates the potential of our approach, whose main idea is to
leverage workarounds for process improvement by addressing their sources rather than
the workarounds themselves, which are rather a symptom than a solution.
Toward using this analysis method in industry, it is important to consider and address
the following challenges: (1) properly build and use i* models – the analysis should be
performed by professional analysts, who are familiar with i* modeling; (2) implement
i* according to the proposed analysis guidance, in the context of capturing global and
local goals – analysts should understand and follow the guidance, which could possibly
require some training; and, (3) rely on openness of employees in interviews – different
questions posed around central topics allow for some triangulation of the elicited infor-
mation, in order to mitigate risks of social-serving bias and other biases potentially
affecting employees’ responses.
Several limitations need to be acknowledged. The approach proposed in this paper
was thus far implemented in a single case study. Additional implementations in differ-
ent organizations would provide a more generalizable view of the benefits of this ap-
proach. The approach uses interviews as a central means for eliciting data, which is
subject to report and self-serving biases. This limitation is mitigated, to some extent,
by triangulation with data elicited from complementary sources (see Section 4.1).
Future research can focus further on the complementary data sources and search for
ways to extract some of the information in automatic ways, for example, based on log
events analysis, reducing human effort required for the workaround analysis process.
Acknowledgement: The research is supported by the Israel Science Foundation under
grant agreement 669/17
References
1. Alter, S. (2014) Theory of Workarounds, Communications of the Association for Infor-
mation Systems, 34(1), 1041-1066.
2. Alter, S. (2015). A Workaround Design System for Anticipating, Designing, and/or Prevent-
ing Workarounds. In Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling (pp.
489-498). Springer International Publishing.
3. Beerepoot, I., Ouali, A., van de Weerd, I., & Reijers, H. A. (2019). Working around health
information systems: To accept or not to accept?. In Proceedings of the 27th European Con-
ference on Information Systems (ECIS 2019).
15
4. Dalpiaz, F., Franch, X., & Horkoff, J. (2016). istar 2.0 language guide. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1605.07767.
5. Ferneley, E. H., Sobreperez, P. (2006) Resist, Comply or Workaround? An Examination of
Different Facets of User Engagement with Information Systems, European Journal of Infor-
mation Systems, 15(4), 345-356.
6. Friedman, A., Crosson, J. C., Howard, J., Clark, E. C., Pellerano, M., Crabtree, B. F., Jaen,
C. R., & Cohen, D. J. (2014). A Typology of Electronic Health Record Workarounds in
Small-to-Medium Size Primary Care Practices, Journal of the American Medical Informat-
ics Association (21) pp 78-83.
7. Hammer, M. (2010). What is business process management?. In Handbook on Business Pro-
cess Management 1 (pp. 3-16). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
8. Harmon, P. (2010). Business process change: A guide for business managers and BPM and
Six Sigma professionals. Morgan Kaufmann.
9. Malaurent, J., & Avison, D. (2016). Reconciling global and local needs: a canonical action
research project to deal with workarounds. Information Systems Journal, 26(3), 227-257.
10. Röder, N., Wiesche, M., Schermann, M., & Krcmar, H. (2014). Why managers tolerate
workarounds–the role of information systems.
11. Röder, N., Wiesche, M., Schermann, M., & Krcmar, H. (2015). Workaround Aware Busi-
ness Process Modeling. In Wirtschaftsinformatik (pp. 482-496).
12. Runeson, P., & Höst, M. (2009). Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research
in software engineering. Empirical software engineering, 14(2), 131.
13. Outmazgin, N., & Soffer, P. (2013). Business process workarounds: what can and cannot be
detected by process mining. In Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Mod-
eling (pp. 48-62). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
14. Outmazgin N. & Soffer P., (2016) A process mining-based analysis of business process
workarounds, Software and Systems Modeling. Software and Systems Modeling, 15(2), 309.
15. Poelmans, S. (1999). Workarounds and distributed viscosity in a workflow system: a case
study. ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin, 20(3), 11-12.
16. Sobreperez, P. (2008). Technological Frame Incongruence, Diffusion, and Noncompliance.
In Open IT-based innovation: Moving towards cooperative IT transfer and knowledge dif-
fusion. Springer US, 179-196.
17. Strong, D. M., & Volkoff, O. (2010). Understanding Organization–Enterprise System Fit:
A Path to Theorizing The Information Technology Artifact. MIS Quarterly, 34(4), 731–756.
18. van Beijsterveld, Joost AA, & Willem JH Van Groenendaal. “Solving misfits in ERP imple-
mentations by SMEs.” Information Systems Journal 26.4 (2016): 369-393.
19. Walsham, G. (2006). Doing interpretive research. European journal of information systems,
15(3), 320-330.
20. Wilkin, C. L., and Davern, M. (2012). Acceptance of Post-Adoption Unanticipated IS Us-
age: Towards a Taxonomy, The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems (43:3) pp
9-25.
21. Yu, E. (2011). Modelling strategic relationships for process reengineering. Social Modeling
for Requirements Engineering, 11, 2011.
