Intelligent Virtual Assistant's Impact on Technical Proficiency within Virtual Teams

Information-systems development continues to be a difficult process, particularly for virtual teams that do not have the luxury of meeting face-to-face. The research literature on this topic reinforces this point: the greater part of database systems development projects ends in failure. The use of virtual teams to complete projects further compounds these failures. However, recent developments in intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), such as Siri, Cortana, or Watson, have created opportunities to automate the systems-development process and improve success rates. Specifically, the use of a virtual assistant possessing key knowledge about database systems development can increase virtual team member technical proficiency in project-based skills. In addition, a virtual assistant can contribute to the development of higher-quality virtual team projects—in this case, database management systems. This observational study found that while the result of statistical analysis was not quite significant, teams that used the IVA did develop higher-quality team projects.