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XSEL's Progress: The Continuing Journey of an Expert System.
Enid Mumford and W. Bruce MacDonald John Wiley and Sons: Chichester, 1989. 241 p. Price £19.95 Hardback.
ISBN 0471923222
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A 1988 report by Ovum Ltd. for the Department of Trade and Industry is salutary. By 1987 there were some 150 user organisations and some 650 full-time staff doing serious development work on expert systems in the UK, though most of the staff, and activity, were concentrated in just 38 organisations. Of 16 companies interviewed, 2 had between them 10 systems operational, 2 had 4 operational, and the rest had none. Taking a sectorial approach, Stevenson's more recent survey of expert systems in UK financial service companies, usually at the forefront of IT usage, found that none were yet using expert systems commercially, and only 6 per cent were experimenting with them. All UK reports show that the applications that are operational or under development are with few exceptions, relatively simple and modest in their aims. The surprising thing is that in fact these UK activity levels compare well with that in competitor countries, in terms of both government support and commercial development.
Yet the application of expert systems should have significant effects, analogous to improving the supply of skilled people at low cost -- a major perceived requirement across all sectors and economies. What expert systems applications, then, are likely to be acceptable, and under what conditions? How can these be designed, developed and implemented successfully? What problems are likely to be experienced in these processes? The time would seem to be ripe for this book by Mumford and MacDonald, and through the medium of a case study, these questions are largely answered, though the experiences described must be accepted as helpful to rather than laying down principles for the technological change managers to whom this work is addressed.
The system in question -- XSEL -- was developed in Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the 1980s. The problem it addressed was...