An interesting phenomenon that has received limited attention in the extant literature is that of IT workaround practices. Based on Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, workarounds were found to be used to accomplish the basic task of matching unmatched variety in the system. The Interaction Effectiveness (IE) ratio of 1.4 was used as a baseline to uncover potential sources of workarounds. The Ech...

Design routines are increasingly digitalized, but it is not clear whether this increased digital intensity will reduce, increase, or have no effect on routine variation. In this paper we report on a study of design routines across four organizational contexts to understand the effect of digital intensity on routine variation. By developing a view grounded in the Law of Requisite Variety, we ske...

A model based on strikingly different philosophical as. sumptions from those currently popular is proposed for the design of online subject catalog access. Three design principles are presented and discussed: uncertainty (subject indexing is indeterminate and probabilis-tic beyond a certain point), variety (by Ashby's law of requisite variety, variety of searcher query must equal variety of doc...