Affiliations: [a] Graduate School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-1421, USA | [b] Institute of Safety and Systems Management, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0021, USA
Abstract: This paper examines the potential organizational impact of expert systems (ES's), in particular, the impact on decision making, organizational structure, degree of decentralization, level of organizational effectiveness, content of organizational roles, leadership and power, communications and information flow and the personnel requirements of the organization. Generally, the nature and magnitude of the impact can be described as a function of many factors, four of which are considered in this paper: the suitability of tasks to ES's, the purpose of use of the ES, the ES tools used and the ES computing environment.
Keywords: Expert systems, artificial intelligence, organization theory
