Chatbot Introduction and Operation in Enterprises – A Design Science Research-based Structured Procedure Model for Chatbot Projects

Chatbot research has become an emerging research area.Researchers survey the technology behind and the whole ecosystem from different perspectives, e.g., human-computer interaction, design research, or anthropomorphism.To foster the transfer from research to practice, a comprehensive structured procedure model is missing yet.Due to this, the transfer of the research results into real-world settings in enterprises is often complicated.Hereto, we propose a comprehensive structured procedure model to guide practitioners in chatbot projects based on a Design Science Research study.In doing so, necessary project steps are pointed out and corresponding research results are highlighted to make them reusable for practice in a targeted manner.Thus, we provide structured support for chatbot projects in enterprises. IntroductionChatbot research is currently a widespread field of research in today's scientific community.Also from a practice perspective, the adoption of chatbots is increasing and more and more companies want to integrate chatbots into their application landscape.Due to digitalization efforts and intentions to support employees in enterprises more individually, chatbots or conversational agents are been applied in various scenarios like customer support, information acquisition, or e-learning [1][2][3][4].Hereby, the research community adapts to this by surveying chatbots through different application areas [5][6][7] or by deriving design recommendations for creating chatbots [7,8].Besides application area-centered research, researchers try to survey the chatbot ecosystem on a more general business level.Thereby, research directions tackle, e.g., trust aspects, humanizing the chatbot, and challenges [2,[9][10][11][12].This generalized research can typically be reused and adapted for deviating scenarios or use cases.However, for productive applications of chatbots, e.g., in enterprises, these contributions only cover single aspects of the whole project lifecycle.Depending on project progress, different aspects need to be considered.The intertwining among the scientific findings is further difficult to trace and almost impossible to map through the individual contributions.Practitioners are faced with the challenge of implementing and carrying out their own chatbot projects due to missing guidelines.But also for science, the linkage of the contributions and their mutual effects cannot be made completely transparent.Thus, there is a need for a comprehensive structured framework on how to incorporate the existing research for conducting enterprise chatbot projects.Up to now, some researchers already summarize their findings and deduce generalized design principles for enterprise chatbots [2,13,14].However, only two approaches are known to us that aim at creating enterprise guidelines [15,16].Hereby the first focuses only on the technical aspects while disregarding the organizational or individual ones.The second one addresses three partial aspects, i.e., use case, technology, and humanness, and derives best practices without integrating them into overall project organizations.Thus, comprehensive guidelines covering all relevant aspects of the chatbot lifecycle, i.e., technical, organizational, and individual, are missing.For applications in enterprises, the current research could often not easily be applied in a targeted manner.This can also hinder chatbot projects in businesses and result in lower outcomes, as critical aspects are forgotten, or wrong decisions are made.Thus, our research aim is to construct a comprehensive business guideline for conducting chatbot projects.Therefore, we propose a procedure model for chatbot projects from an organizational-level, which (1) builds on previous experiences of chatbot projects, and (2) includes scientific results to guide future projects.Hereto, we conduct a Design Science Research (DSR) study [17,18] and answer the research question:How to structure and conduct chatbot projects in businesses based on actionable guidelines?Next, we outline the related research.Then, we describe our DSR-approach.After this, we present our procedure model and discuss the results.