Digitale Souveränität in soziotechnischen Systemen – KI-Nutzung und Krisenbewältigung

Our contribution to the journal Group. Interaction. Organization, discusses the interplay between the concepts of sociotechnical system and digital sovereignty. The respective theoretical backgrounds are considered and functional relationships between the two subject areas are derived. A sociotechnical approach is proposed that can be used to develop evaluation and design criteria for contexts of action that are conducive to the digital sovereignty of companies and employees. Against this background, the article outlines two empirical fields of analysis and design: In the first empirical field, the approach is applied to the participatory design of industrial work environments that are being reshaped by the introduction of advanced algorithmic systems or AI (artificial intelligence) systems. Such AI-based systems pose a major challenge for design in terms of digital sovereignty, among other things because of their inherent opacity. In a workshop with 50 participants from various business enterprises and research institutions, a matrix for the socio-technical analysis of work environments was applied along real case studies. The three case studies came from the application fields of automotive, brewery and packaging technology. All three cases involve the integration of AI-supported methods into existing workflows. The method allows structured interaction with synchronous visualization of design ideas, which is conducive to co-creative formats. The second empirical application field to which the socio-technical approach was applied focuses on digital sovereignty at the organizational level of companies and institutions. The study under consideration explored how organizations dealt with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Five industries were analyzed (retail, health care including nursing, public administration, business-related services, public transport), each with four case studies mapping the impact of the crisis based on guided interviews with both the employer and employee sides. This shows that correlations between the characteristics of socio-technical systems and digital sovereignty also offer interpretative aids here.