Executives are intrigued by stories of computer programs that can analyze mud during oil drilling or configure complex computer systems. N L Baroid Company’s MUDMAN and Digital Equipment Corporation’s XCON perform tasks previously thought too complicated or not routine enough for computers. MUDMAN and XCON are not ordinary computer programs though. They are “expert systems”—programs that mimic the thinking of the human experts who would otherwise have to perform the analysis, design, or monitoring (see the ruled insert for a detailed definition). Through a complicated series of “if…then” rules—“If there is a disk drive that has not been assigned and there is capacity for at least one disk drive, then assign the disk drive to the current computer configuration”—such programs allow computers to solve difficult, one-of-a-kind problems.1
A version of this article appeared in the March 1988 issue of Harvard Business Review.