If Your Staff Are Working Around the System, Your Data Is Working Against You.

By Al Cormier, Director of Thought Leadership and Corporate Partnerships, Mi-Case

A case manager in a county jail gets handed a new intake workflow. It's supposed to take four minutes. It takes eleven, because two of the required fields don't match anything that actually happens during intake. So she fills them in with whatever gets her past the screen. Nobody trained her to do that. She figured it out on a Tuesday, three weeks after go-live, and by the following month, everyone on her shift is doing it the same way.

That's not a training gap. That's a configuration gap wearing a training gap's clothes.

The Real Problem

Most agencies treat this as a discipline problem, tell staff to follow protocol more carefully. But protocol only holds when the system matches how the work actually happens. A rigid, one-size-fits-all configuration forces every shift into a workflow built for someone else's floor, and when it doesn't fit, staff don't stop the work, they route around the system. That's not defiance. It's the rational response to a bad fit, and it doesn't stay a one-off: workarounds get taught to the next new hire as “how it's done,” and within a few report cycles, the data reflects the workaround, not the operation.

Where This Shows Up in the Room

In thirty years of watching systems get implemented, I've never once seen a workaround get invented out of laziness. I've seen them get invented because staff are tired and overwhelmed and they are looking for a solution to a problem created by a bad configuration. Staff aren't the variable here. The system is.

We configure to the workflow that actually exists on the floor, not the one in the policy manual, because a system staff have to fight with will always lose to the shortcut that's faster. That's not a feature. It's the difference between data you can trust and data that looks trustworthy until someone checks it against what really happened.

Before Your Next Report Goes Out

Three questions worth asking, and none of them are theoretical:

Does your configuration match the floor, or the manual? Walk the workflow yourself, on a real shift, not a demo. If staff hesitate or improvise at a specific step, that's not a training issue. That's a configuration issue with your name on it.

Where have your staff already voted with their workarounds? Ask your case managers and records staff what they do when the system doesn't do what they need. If they have an answer ready, they've already told you where your data is unreliable. You just haven't asked yet.

Would your staff say the system fits the work, or fits the org chart? Systems configured around what's easy to build, instead of what's true to the floor, get worked around. Every time.

The Closer

Reentry 2030, legislative mandates, and public dashboards are all making agencies stake their credibility on data pipelines they haven't stress-tested against the floor. The agencies that meet those commitments won't be the ones with the strictest policy manual. They'll be the ones whose system never asked staff to choose between doing it right and doing it fast.

Al Cormier is a 31-year corrections veteran and Director of Thought Leadership and Corporate Partnerships at Mi-Case.