Abstract

Enterprise social media (ESM) platforms are a central hub for team collaboration. While they can effectively facilitate communication among distributed individuals and teams, promoting knowledge sharing remains a major challenge. ESM users are often unaware of others’ knowledge and therefore are unable to seek experts or share knowledge with those who need it. A potential solution could be the use of knowledge broker bots that automatically connect knowledge seekers with knowledge providers to facilitate knowledge sharing. However, given the focus of existing literature on the human element of knowledge brokering, our understanding of the use and impact of such bots on knowledge sharing in ESM is limited. Therefore, we conducted a two-month, exploratory study with five student teams on Slack. Our findings provide initial insights into how users interact with a knowledge broker bot and how the bot establishes connections between users as a critical conduit to successful knowledge brokering.

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