Compliance with the new system is high. The data coming out of it cannot be used. Both are consequences of the same decision.
Making use compulsory changes the motivation and nothing else.
It does not make a task possible, a design usable, a process workable, or data trustworthy. Where any of those is the obstacle, a mandate converts a solvable problem into a hidden one.
Research on mandated systems found that attitudes still form and still shape how a system is used — they simply no longer determine whether it is opened. What people decide is not whether to comply, but how thoroughly.
What a mandate buys is the minimum behaviour that satisfies it. What the organisation gets is whatever the design has defined as sufficient.
There is a second cost, less obvious and more expensive. Where somebody can choose not to use a system, poor design is punished by non-use, and the organisation finds out. Where they cannot, poor design is absorbed by them.
Compulsion removes the signal that would have told you something was wrong. Which means a mandatory system carries a higher obligation to be workable, not a lower one.
Built to Be Used, chapter 25, covers mandatory systems, frontline work and regulated environments.
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This article accompanies the book Built to Be Used.