The role of expert systems in knowledge management: An analytical perspective

Today, in the competitive world, companies need to use their competitive factors to stay alive and grow. Living in the information age, information is one of the most important competitive factors that companies have. Knowledge as a competitive factor has hit the business headlines with a bang but companies must develop their knowledge in a targeted fashion and not leave it to develop haphazardly. Knowledge must be managed. One of the most important tools in managing knowledge is an expert system(ES). Expert systems by capturing knowledge from an expert, who is likely to be unavailable in the future, make the expertise of an individual available to others in the company and finally provide some consistency in decision making. Considering this, a study was conducted to analyze expert systems from a knowledge management point of view, Using KSS (Knowledge Structure and Services) Matrix and the KSS Checklist.. For this purpose the KSS Matrix and the KSS Checklist had been filled out considering a typical ES. This method of analyzing a system is quite subjective. The outcome of this research, utilizing The KSS Matrix, indicates that ES supports a wide range of knowledge structures and provides a core set of services to handle formulating an expertise into a computerized program. Further Result Obtained, indicates that Expert System does not attempt to be a packaged service as defined, because it focuses exclusively on translating knowledge from one file format to another.