Theorising Workaround-Centric Data Issues: A Literature Analysis

Workarounds are human actor performances to overcome IT artefact deficiencies impacting the completion of their work. While data issues' financial and reputational impacts can be detrimental for organisations, the link between data issues and workarounds remains under-investigated. We focus on data issues that cause workarounds (research question#1) and data issues that workarounds create (research question#2). Our objective is to theorise Workaround-centric Data Issues (WCDI). We conducted a comprehensive literature review by identifying 62 empirical papers from Information Systems (IS) databases (2009-2019). Next, we established a WCDI taxonomy using open coding. Based on this taxonomy, we introduce 12 hypotheses and a conceptual model of WCDI. We find eight data issues that cause workarounds and eleven data issues that workarounds create. We identify two prominent data issues: data loss and data accuracy. Furthermore, mitigating data loss requires a focus on ergonomic design, data entry, data storage, and the user. Mitigating data accuracy requires a focus on the user. Our taxonomy, hypotheses, and conceptual model organise existing research and promote further theorising on WCDI. To our knowledge, this research is the first to examine WCDI. Hence, we progress in the development of approaches to reduce WCDI's negative impacts.