Desire paths and shadow IT

Any substantial use of a system or solution will usually result in some sort of workarounds where users will try to get what they want if it’s not officially or adequately supported. Chris Siebenmann documented an example of users running heavy jobs on the university’s login server, something it’s not designed to do. This undesired usage was described by him as a desire path: In a university, what you get in practice is more like a field with a certain amount of desire paths in it. You can build paths and exhort people to not step on the grass, but they’re going to do it anyway. And obviously, the more pathways you don’t build, the more people are going to make their own paths. I quite liked this description, in a corporate environment this type of user behaviour would be labelled as shadow IT. It has a sort of menacing ring to it. If the user does something that works around a limitation to accomplish a task, it’s likely they lack the tools or guidance on doing that thing in the…