Knowledge-based systems and large public organizations: An application to Navy budget analysis

This report describes activities and findings resulting from an expert system development project undertaken for the US Naval Sea System Command. One goal of the project centers on assessing the role of knowledge-based technology in large public organizations, specifically in applications designed to enhance human knowledge, attention and cognitive processing capabilities. A second goal pertains to evaluating the characteristics of various micro-computer-based, expert system building software packages. Of the prototype systems built and tested the most successful analyzes budget submissions for anomalous and unsupportable budget requests. Under controlled conditions, the prototype was able to analyze a real budget submission and find all deficient line item requests in fifteen minutes. A human analyst needs on average 3.5 hours to complete this exercise. These findings strongly suggest that knowledge-based systems have significant potential in the budget processes of large public organizations. With respect to evaluating software, several packages were used, and those with more flexible programming environments were found most useful.