Toward Intelligent Web-based Redesign Support

The reengineering phenomenon continues to be very important in business and management, but the consultantsupported reengineering practice to date has been very expensive and questionable in terms of success. One problem with reengineering at present is the absence of intelligent tools to support process redesign, but recent work on a knowledge-based system called KOPeR has addressed this problem through the design and deployment of the capability for intelligent reengineering "advice." The research described in this paper extends KOPeR to incorporate Web-based connectivity to enable Internet access and use by remote clients. This paper traces through the motivation and background behind intelligent redesign support using rule-based systems and discusses the extension of KOPeR to accommodate Web interface and access. The paper closes with a set of future direction for research along these lines. Reengineering Knowledge-Based Systems With nearly all major corporations--and many other enterprises in the military, government, universities and elsewhere--actively engaged in business process reengineering (BPR) projects (Bashein et al. 1994), reengineering phenomenon continues to be very important in business and management. However, the reengineering practice to date reflects a questionable record of success and as currently practiced, BPR consulting is a laborintensive activity, which makes these external consulting services very expensive--particularly given the prevalence of billing rates amounting to several hundreds of dollars per hour. Although reengineering consultants and practitioners are supported by a plethora of tools for representing enterprise processes, such tools are devoid of intelligence, yet the reengineering domain has been described as offering good opportunity for AI (Hamscher 1994, Yu et al. 1996), particularly through knowledgebased systems (KBS) technology. Moreover, some researchers are concentrating on automating the activities associated with process redesign--which represents the central activity performed by external reengineering consultants--through knowledge-based systems. Two primary approaches to automated redesign problem solving have been proposed: 1) case-based reasoning (Rock and Yu 1994, Yu and Myopoulos 1996, Yu et al. 1996), and 2) measurement-driven inference (Nissen 1996). Case-based reasoning (CBR) mirrors the kind human problem solving accomplished by reengineeriug consultants and a relatively large number of redesign cases now exist for knowledge representation and indexing. However, organizational processes represent very complex systems, each of which has a great many idiosyncrasies and details that can be critical to redesign efficacy, but rarely are such factors expressly recorded in terms that can be incorporated into a casebase; hence a reengineering CBR system would have considerable difficulty adapting previous redesign cases to the needs of novel and dissimilar process instances and problems. This represents a textbook problem with CBR (Rich and Knight 1991). more serious difficulty with this CBR approach, perhaps, involves the automation of an analytical method that fails more than half the time in practice (e.g., see Hammer and Champy 1993). Alternatively, a data-driven method can address such idiosyncrasies and details directly (Talebzadeh et al. 1995) and techniques for standardized measurement promote cross-process comparability and inferential robustness. Moreover, some classic problem-solving systems such as MYCIN (Shortliffe 1976) and SOPHIE (Brown et 1982) have long been implemented around measurementdriven inference and based on straightforward rule-based reasoning. Specifically, MYCIN uses counts of white blood cells to drive inference oriented toward the diagnosis of blood disease and SOPHIE uses electrical measurements such as voltage to guide inference oriented toward diagnosing faults in electronic circuits. Both systems perform heuristic classification (Jackson 1990) and suggest that analogous redesign problem solving may be feasible. An analogous KBS to support process redesign has been designed to provide intelligent reengineering "advice" by diagnosing the pathologies or faults associated with organizational processes and applying reengineering From: AAAI Technical Report WS-97-02. Compilation copyright © 1997, AAAI (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. knowledge to guide the selection of appropriate treatments and repairs (i.e., enabling technologies and redesign transformations) to generate a set of redesign alternatives (Nissen 1997). The background information pertaining this KOPeR design is presented in the next section.