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Chapter 9 Business Intelligence Systems
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Before we turn to those specific technologies, however, consider the overall goals and benefits
of KM. KM benefits organizations in two fundamental ways:
• Improve process quality
• Increase team strength

As you know, process quality is measured by effectiveness and efficiency, and knowledge
management can improve both. KM enables employees to share knowledge with each other and
with customers and other partners. By doing so, it enables the employees in the organization to
better achieve the organization’s strategy. At the same time, sharing knowledge enables employ-
ees to solve problems more quickly and to otherwise accomplish work with less time and other
resources, hence improving process efficiency. 17
Additionally, recall from Chapter 2 that successful teams not only accomplish their assigned tasks,
they also grow in capability, both as a team and as individuals. By sharing knowledge, team members
learn from one another, avoid making repetitive mistakes, and grow as business professionals.
For example, consider the help desk at any organization, say, one that provides support for
electronic components like iPhones. When a user has a problem with an iPhone, he or she might
contact Apple support for help. The customer service department has, collectively, seen just about
any problem that can ever occur with an iPhone. The organization, as a whole, knows how to
solve the user’s problem. However, that is no guarantee that a particular support representative
knows how to solve that problem. The goal of KM is to enable employees to be able to use knowl-
edge possessed collectively by people in the organization. By doing so, both process quality and
team capability improve.

What Are Expert Systems?

The earliest KM systems, called expert systems, attempted to directly capture employee expertise.
They existed long before social media and in fact were in use long before the Internet.
Expert systems are rule-based systems that encode human knowledge in the form of If/
Then rules. Such rules are statements that specify if a particular condition exists, then to take
some action. Figure 9-25 shows an example of a few rules that could be part of a medical expert
system for diagnosing heart disease. In this set of rules, the system examines various factors for
heart disease and computes a CardiacRiskFactor. Depending on the value of that risk factor, other
variables are given values.
The set of rules shown here may need to be processed many times because it is possible that
CardiacRiskFactor is used on the If side of a rule occurring before these rules. Unlike this example,
an operational expert system may consist of hundreds, if not thousands, of rules.
The programs that process a set of rules are called expert systems shells. Typically, the shell
processes rules until no value changes. At that point, the values of all the variables are reported
as results.

Other rules here...

IF CardiacRiskFactor = ‘Null’ THEN Set CardiacRiskFactor = 0
IF PatientSex = ‘Male’ THEN Add 3 to CardiacRiskFactor
IF PatientAge >55 THEN Add 2 to CardiacRiskFactor
IF FamilyHeartHistory = ‘True’ THEN Add 5 to CardiacRiskFactor
IF CholesterolScore = ‘Problematic’ THEN Add 4 to CardiacRiskFactor
IF BloodPressure = ‘Problematic’ THEN Add 3 to CardiacRiskFactor
IF CardiacRiskFactor >15 THEN Set EchoCardiagramTest = ‘Schedule’
...
Other rules here...
Figure 9-25
Example of If/Then Rules