Intelligent Systems in Everyday Work Practices: Integrations and Sociotechnical Calibrations

Abstract

A key challenge to the implementation and adoption of intelligent machines in the workplace is their integration with situated work practices and organizational processes. We examine these issues through a qualitative field study in the domain of information technology (IT) services procurement, where highly-skilled IT architects spend considerable effort reading and digesting client RFPs to design technical solutions. Our field study focuses on the design and development of an intelligent tool meant to augment architects’ design work. Along with usability issues and curiosity about the tool’s underlying intelligent features, architects raised a number of questions about how the tool would be used in relation to other processes and workflows that comprised their design work. Our findings consider how intelligent systems are actors within a sociotechnical system and how new relations emerge through their introduction, raising questions for future intelligent system design and integration.