South Africa, June 22 -- These are workarounds, and while each one looks like a small act of individual problem-solving, together they represent something more significant: evidence that the system and the people using it haven't reached alignment yet.

The instinct is to treat workarounds as a compliance problem: enforce system use, restrict access to spreadsheet tools, and issue reminders until behaviour changes. But enforcement alone rarely solves the problem, because workarounds are not usually acts of defiance. They are acts of survival, created when the system does not give people what they need to do their job and they need to do their job anyway.

Fixing workarounds means fixing what caused them.

The causes fall into one of four ...