Designing an enterprise social questions and answers site to enable scalable user-to-user support

Abstract

Nowadays, the information technology infrastructure within organizations is getting more and more heterogeneous. Recent trends such as bringyour- own-device or choose-your-own-device satisfy user requests for diverse devices they already know from their private life. On the other hand, following these trends results in an increased complexity of the organizations’ infrastructure and a substantial rise in required effort for supporting users. In order to address this increased support demand, the establishment of a user-to-user support culture seems promising. An established concept to provide user-to-user support is the concept of social questions and answers (SQA) sites. SQA sites have been shown to be successful in the private context. Users can seek and provide knowledge and thereby support each other. This paper presents the design and evaluation of an enterprise SQA platform aiming to support employees in solving problems with processes or technologies. Building on already derived design principles, we discuss the design and implementation of the SQA prototype within an existing Customer Relation Management platform. The resulting system was then evaluated within five focus group sessions with professionals from various industries. The evaluation results show the validity of our design principles and the usefulness of the implemented prototype.