How affordances of chatbots cross the chasm between social and traditional enterprise systems

Abstract

Digital and agile companies widely use chatbots in the form of integrations into enterprise messengers such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence about their action possibilities (i.e., affordances), for example, to link social interactions with third-party systems and processes. Therefore, we adopt a three-stage process. Grounded in a preliminary study and a qualitative study with 29 interviews from 17 organizations, we inductively derive rich contextual insights of 14 affordances and constraints, which serve as input for a Q-Methodology study that highlights five perceptional differences. We find that actualizing these affordances leads to higher-level affordances of chatbots that augment social information systems with affordances of traditional enterprise systems. Crossing the chasm between these, so far, detached systems contributes a novel perspective on how to balance novel digital with traditional systems, flexibility and malleability with stability and control, exploration with exploitation, and agility with discipline.