Speaker: Prof. Daniel Beverungen and Dr. Frank Köhne

Abstract: Times of rapid change and high demand for organizational agility promote workarounds. Employees develop these informal solutions to remedy challenges (misfits) in their day-to-day work. Workarounds can be catalysts for process innovation and disrupt existing organizational structures. In this talk, we examine the organizational context of workarounds and present methods for their identification and evaluation, reinterpreting workarounds as options for bottom-up process innovations. These results are some of the findings from the Change.WorkAROUND project. It is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the funding program Industry 4.0 – Transformability of Companies in Tomorrow’s Value Creation (InWandel). We mainly present findings from the project’s Action Design Research (ADR) part involving three additional industry partners: KRONE, REMBE, and Westfalen.

Short Bios: 

Prof. Dr. Daniel Beverungen holds the Chair of Information Systems, particularly Business Information Systems, at Paderborn University and is Vice Dean for Processes and Cooperation at the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics. He studied Information Systems at the University of Paderborn and subsequently worked as a research assistant, academic advisor, and deputy professor at the Institute for Information Systems at the WWU Münster. Daniel’s research focuses on service research, business process management, information modeling, and the design and emergence of innovative information systems. He is an editor of various academic journals - for example, a Department Editor for Business Process Management of the journal BISE. Current leadership positions include Chair of the Board of the Software Innovation Lab (SI-Lab) at Paderborn University, Chair of the Steering Committee of the Software Innovation Campus Paderborn (SICP), and Academic Director of the Service Science Competence Center at the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). He worked as a visiting researcher at TU Berlin, the University of Melbourne, the Queensland University of Technology, and the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST).

Dr. Frank Köhne acts as coordinator of the Change.WorkAROUND project. He studied Information Systems in Münster and holds a PhD from Hohenheim University (Stuttgart) where he worked with Mareike Schoop on IT-supported business negotiations. He works as a consultant at viadee Unternehmensberatung AG in Münster since 2008 and Co-Leads the Data & AI competence centre.