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8.3. STAGE 3: AUTOMATED AND SUPPORT ES APPLICATIONS

Stage 3 is completed through use of ES applications in the sections described above. Coupled with electronic audit trails, many routine decisions and tasks are automated within the organization, and many others are supported by ES. In marketing and sales, ES help the organization establish better relationships and partnerships with their customers, better match products to customer needs, and to increase profit margins through improved pricing. Outside the organization, customers have direct access to powerful ES tools provided by the organization to help them understand and purchase products, as well as maintain and repair products. Many products also have embedded ES for improved performance and service.

8.4. STAGE 4: IPSS AND KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY

In Stage 4, Centers of Expertise (COE) are formed that are responsible for the collecting, learning, organizing, and distributing of knowledge for core competencies and other domain specialities of importance to the organization. COE educate and certify workers in their specialities, provide qualified workers and consulting services both online and in person to clients, and set and enforce standards for their specialities. COE also create, maintain, and enhance knowledge repositories and IPSS through internal and external research, as well as employee and organizational feedback.

Other artificial intelligence disciplines are also applied to solve business problems. In particular, machine learning techniques are applied for dynamic optimization of resource allocation and workload scheduling applications, resulting in dramatic gains in performance. Machine learning is also used for knowledge discovery and data mining (Fayyad et. al., 1996), as well as to detect trends in data, such as MIS data. Intelligent Assistants, combined with natural language understanding and text generation, are used to search for, select, and summarize news stories on certain topics.

The most dramatic performance gains will come from the deployment of Integrated Performance Support Systems (IPSS) that provide employees with coordinated services for task information, advice, training, job aids, reference, and administrative and personal resources to meet organizational and individual needs. These services might include sophisticated automation of and/or support for task processing and structuring; tutoring; problem-solving; decision-making; and information analysis through knowledge discovery and data mining techniques.

Creating the knowledge organization could be the next great challenge for the application of ES in business. If, as some authors on strategic management have claimed, knowledge is the only real source of competitive advantage, then knowledge organizations may be the primary competitive weapon of the future. And if this is so, then knowledge engineers and business applications of ES have a very bright future indeed.

REFERENCES

Beckman, T. "An expert system in taxation: the taxpayer service assistant." Chapter in
Managing and Developing Expert Systems. J. Liebowitz, Ed. Yourdan. 1990.
Beckman, T. Applying AI to Business Reengineering Tutorial. 146 pages. Presented at the
World Congress on Expert Systems III. Seoul, Korea. February, 1996.
Couger, D. Creativity and Innovation in Information System Organizations. Course
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Coyne, R., Rosenman, M., Radford, A., Balachandran, M., and Gero, J. Knowledge-Based
Design Systems. Addison-Wesley. 1990.
Darr, T. and Dym, C. "Configuration Design: An Overview." In this volume.
Fayyad, U., Piatetsky-Shapiro, G., Smyth, P., Uthurusamy, R., Eds. Advances in Knowledge
Discovery and Data Mining. MIT Press. 1996.
Hammer, M. and Champy, J. Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business
Revolution. HarperCollins. 1993.
Kaplan R. and Norton, D. "The balanced scorecard -- measures that drive performance,"
Harvard Business Review. Jan-Feb 1992.
Kolodner, J. Case-Based Reasoning. Morgan Kaufmann. 1993.
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Technology: Proceedings of The Third World Congress on Expert Systems. Cognizant Communication Corp. 1996.
Ruby, D. and Kibler, D. "Learning recurring subplans," in Machine Learning Methods for
Planning. Minton, S., Ed. Morgan Kaufmann. 1993.
Shneiderman, B. Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer
Interface, 2nd ed. Addison-Wesley. 1992.
VanGundy, A. Idea Power: Techniques and Resources to Unleash the Creativity in Your
Organization. AMACOM. 1992.
Waterman, D. in Hayes-Roth, F., Waterman, D., and Lenat, D., Ed. Building Expert Systems.
Addison-Wesley. 1983.
Winslow, C. and Bramer, W. Future Work: Putting Knowledge to Work in the Knowledge<
Economy. Free Press. 1994.


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