A Value Based Approach to the Development of Knowledge Engineering Systems that Integrates Product Design and Software Engineering: Methodology and Application

There is an increasing trend across enterprises, technology or otherwise, to develop Knowledge Engineering systems to support core business activities, e.g. product development, customer support, and marketing. Frequently the deployment of these systems does not yield a valuable return on investment, either because they are not very useful to the users or the utility that they do deliver is not proportional to the amount of resources invested by the organization. For the rapid and effective development of high-value Knowledge Engineering System it is critical to take an integrated approach value-focused approach to the design, development, and delivery of the system. To this end we propose an integrated framework for the development of high-value Knowledge Engineering software systems. Our novel contribution is the integration of Product Design methods such as the House of Quality, Function Structure analysis, Morphological Matrices, and Utility Functions to address value considerations throughout the November 7, 2011 DRAFT DOCUMENT NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION 2 design and development process. Depending on the complexity of the problem and the timeconstraints the formal methods can often be simplified to increase cost-effectiveness. The proposed framework has been used to develop a simple but non-trivial Knowledge Engineering system for working with service request (support case) data in the computernetworking domain. The developed system improved productivity when working with service requests by over 30% compared to the previously used tools. Furthermore the structured approach enabled by the framework allowed the system to be developed both quickly and at low cost to the organization.