Teaching & Learning Management Using Expert System Modeling Tools

An essential key to success in managing effectively is to be able to develop one’s own solutions for one’s own task or situation, based on one’s experiences, the observed experiences of others, and guidelines provided by other experts in the field.  One application of this entrepreneurial process is its applications to developing professional decision guidelines which are part of an individual’s professional expertise developed over the years using this conceptual process.  This paper describes how this professional expertise development process can be applied by an individual to a small business planning situation

The Changing View of Information Systems In Chinese State-Owned Businesses

China is rapidly rolling out its reforms and has undergone many changes in recent years. One area of interest to many researchers and business people is the role that Information Systems/Information Technology (IS/IT) plays in aidingChinese businesses to make the transition from a planned to a free-market economy. The present reform leadership in China has identified the importance of Information Systems/Information Technology in achieving its goals of modernization and technology sophistication through scientific instead of ideologic means (Tate and Maier, 1987). In 1991, Franz, Wynne and Fu (1991) conducted a study of five state-owned businesses in Nanjing, China. They found that IS/IT primarily supported the business objective of reporting on how the company met monthly production and sales quotas passed down by the state planning centers. IS was not found to support strategic decision-making in the organizations. Emphasis was placed instead on accounting for material costs, rejects, production quantity, and efficiency. The IS/IT manager mainly focused on the technical issues of managing data resources for IS/IT applications. The present study revisits the IS/IT situation in Chinese businesses after four more years of economic reform. Four state-owned companies were selected for this study. All are in Beijing, the capital and political, industrial, technological, and cultural center of China. The goal was to study the changing role (situation in 1995 compared to 1991) of IS/IT in Chinese state-owned businesses, focusing on three aspects: the business objective of these companies and the evidence of IS/IT to support it, the role of the IS/IT manager, and the evidence of technological advances in these companies. It was hypothesized that with four more years into economic reform, this study would find advances in IS/IT\u27s presence especially in decision support areas, and that the IS manager role would grow beyond its technology manager base, and that more advanced technology would bein place, especially as this study considers larger companies in a larger city. The results of the study of the four companies yielded the following: two companies, although still state-owned, have begun to realize the importance of IS/IT in order to grow in an evolving market-based economy. Competition from private companies that have appeared in the past few years, most with strategic alliances with western multinational corporations, have forced the top management of these companies to address the importance of IS/IT to support critical decision making areas for strategy planning. The role of the IS/IT manager is not really changing. While at least one manager in this study sits on the company\u27s strategy planning committee, not one manager was found tomake any real impact at the top decision-making level. Generally, these companies have begun to implement much more advanced information systems and technology to achieve their business objectives. Networked systems, integrated database plans, and decision support systems are among the many technological advances that these companies are implementing today. This study\u27s contribution is the documented picture it draws of the little reported IS/IT area in an emerging market economy. In addition, because the cases studied are among the top organizations in their industry in all China, it provides extraordinary insight into this once hidden world

Learning How to Learn: Nurturing Professional Growth Through Cognitive Mapping

This article examines the professional development of entrepreneurs. It describes how cognitive mapping tools drawn from knowledge engineering can be employed to help entrepreneurs both to make decisions and to grow professionally

Computer-supported Group Learning: An Experimental Assessment of Retention

Recently, there has been an increased interest among MIS faculty in applying various electronic support tools to enhance classroom learning (e.g., Hashim et al., 1991; Leidner and Jarvenpaa, 1993; Reisman, 1993; Money, 1994; Wheeler et al., 1994; Alavi and Yoo, 1995). In particular, Group Support Systems (GSS) technology--the computer technology aimed at improving interactions and task performance of a group that can be distributed in time and space--has been identified as promoting learning. Beranek and Lock (1994) suggest that the enhancement of student learning in a GSS environment stems from higher level of student participation than in a traditional classroom setting, and from the technology forcing students to think, rather than just to take notes. Self-reported data from students suggests that GSS-supported learning leads to higher levels of perceived skill development, and to higher evaluation of classroom experience in comparison with non-GSS-supported collaborative learning (Alavi, 1994)

Knowledge-Based Systems: An Exploratory Study Of New Developers

It is pointed out that matching potentially strong developers with appropriate knowledge-based system (KBS) development projects can optimize an organization\u27s allocation of scarce human and financial resources. In a broader sense, it can contribute to supporting an organization\u27s effort to develop the creative computer systems necessary for competitive positioning. To test this hypothesis, the authors report the results of a study of 91 developers new to KBS technology. This group served as a test bed to explore an answer to the question \u27can we learn what kind of developer creates a successful (i.e., innovative and useful) knowledge-based system?\u27 In other words, it there a \u27successful KBS developer\u27 profile? The results provide tentative answers that need to be reconsidered with more rigorous further study

Adding Knowledge-Assistance To Pc-Based Photographic Image Database Management Systems

Many information technology (IT) managers are novices when implementing high-resolution, true color, knowledge-assisted microcomputer photographic image database management systems (IDBMS). Such systems, involving high capacity image data capture, classification, compression, storage, retrieval, and transmission, have not yet been widely described in the literature nor fully implemented in practice. This paper reviews image management fundamentals for emerging digital photographic image data, discusses a prototype system under development to support NASAKennedy Space Center space shuttle ground processing operations, and focuses on the integration of knowledge-based (expert) systems embedded in the prototype to assist in image classification and retrieval. The paper concludes with the design for an integrated high capacity networked PC-LAN IDBMS. © 1993, IGI Global. All rights reserved

Using Expert System Technology for New Venture Strategy Planning

The research presented in this paper is concerned with the question “Can advanced information systems, such as expert knowledge-based systems (EKBS), help in new business strategy formulation? ” More specifically, it focuses on how EKBS can hel