Workarounds in Business Processes: A Goal-Based Analysis

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 problems 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 misalignments between organizational goals, goals of local-units and actors, and the business process that should realize these goals. With this premise, we propose an i*-based analysis for identifying such misalignments that are associated to workarounds. We report an industrial case study that demonstrates the analysis and associates workarounds with the underlying misalignments. Improvement recommendations that were made following the analysis have been accepted by the organization and are currently being implemented.