Margaret Loy Mason
ABSTRACT
The university user community is constantly expanding and becoming more diverse. Providing high quality consulting services to this group places increased demands on centralized user services organizations. At the same time, computing centers face budgetary and time constraints. Consequently, user services organizations must employ innovative means to insure that available expertise meets user needs without reduction or degradation of service. An expert system can be the answer. This paper focuses on the development and implementation of a problem-solving expert system for the User Services staff of the University of Tennessee Computing Center. SolveIt, built with IBM's Expert System Environment, has application as both a staff training tool and a user-accessible production system. The paper concludes with a discussion of experiences from using the system and suggestions for expanding it.
- 1.See Kamran Parsaye and Mark Chignell, Expert Systems For Experts, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1988, for an excellent discussion of expert systems. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- 2.Two presentations at last year's SiGUCCS meeting focused on expert systems. See Regina Trimm DeWitt, "Expert Systems for User Services", Procee&'ngs of ACM-SIGUCCS XVII, 1989, pp. 243-46, for a general discussion of expert systems and their applicability to user services. See Elizabeth Johnson et al, "Consulting Without Consultants: Expert Systems Applications in User Services", Proceedings of ACM- SIGUCCS XVII, 1989, pp. 335-42, for more general discussion as well as a case study of a small-scale expert system in use at the University of Wisconsin- LaCrosse. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 3.SolveIt began as a project in a graduate level systems policy course. The three person group which created SolveIt selected the task of cloning a consultant because they considered it to be an interesting problem, current, and relevant to a specific organization. The author gratefully acknowledges the contributions of James Kirkpatrick and Mark Watt to the initial design and development of SolveIt.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Consultant, clone thyself!
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