The CPIN burden: information management and the re-organization of child welfare work to enable legislative compliance

Drawing on 38 institutional ethnographic interviews with directors, supervisors, and managers at two Children’s Aid Societies in Ontario, Canada, we trace how the Child Protection Information Network (CPIN) and connected texts and technologies have reorganized child welfare work into a data-driven, compliance-oriented activity that privileges auditability over professional discretion and client care. We demonstrate that CIPN’s information architecture generates significant administrative burden and misaligns with the day-to-day data needs of workers who develop supplementary tools and workaround practices that are invisible within official reporting structures. These adaptations highlight the contradiction at the heart of centralized digital infrastructure like CPIN: the appearance of efficiency and standardization depends on the unrecognized labor of practitioners whose work is constrained by the system’s inflexible workflow and preoccupation with particular forms of knowledge (i.e. quantitative data on worker compliance). .