Workarounds to Mandated Data Practices: Rethinking Digital Infrastructure in Child Welfare and Homeless-Serving Organizations

Over the past decade, much of the infrastructure used for social service delivery in Canada has been digitized. Drawing on institutional ethnographic research practices, we undertook observational research, facilitated focus groups with twenty five key informants, and interviewed 121 leaders and workers in the child welfare and youth homelessness sectors to learn how data practices in these sectors are shaped by government-mandated infrastructure and tools associated with the adoption of digital information management systems in the public sphere. Despite promises that these new digital technologies will standardize and streamline data practices, we discovered that the introduction of digital information management technologies has led to a proliferation of ad hoc data practices, undertaken in local agencies to account for the shortcomings of government-mandated digital infrastructure. Our research suggests that the implementation of digital information management systems has not produced the promised efficiencies because they are incompatible with workers’ everyday social work practices, their service delivery aims, and their professional and ethical commitments. Because government-mandated data infrastructures fail to align with and support key aspects of people’s day-to-day work, social workers undertake a range of data workaround practices to fulfill their professional mandates. By focusing on these workaround practices, we pinpoint specific policy and infrastructural challenges facing social workers and point toward possible solutions to many of the problems they describe. Our institutional ethnographic approach helps us situate these practices within the broader relations organizing social service work, while the dual focus on child welfare and youth homelessness highlights how similar infrastructures generate distinct challenges across sectors. This cross-sectoral lens helps uncover both the limitations of one-size-fits-all digital reforms and the value of worker-centered processes for informing future infrastructure design.