Rule-based Expert Systems for Selecting Information Systems Development Methodologies

Information Systems (IS) are increasingly becoming regarded as crucial to an organization's success. Information Systems Development Methodologies (ISDMs) are used by organizations to structure the information system development process. ISDMs are essential for structuring project participants’ thinking and actions; therefore ISDMs play an important role to achieve successful projects. There are different ISDMs and no methodology can claim that it can be applied to any organization. The problem facing decision makers is how to select an appropriate development methodology that may increase the probability of system success. This paper takes this issue into account when study ISDMs and provides a Rule-based Expert System as a tool for selecting appropriate ISDMs. The proposed expert system consists of three main phases to automate the process of selecting ISDMs. Three approaches were used to test the proposed expert system. Face validation through six professors and six IS professionals, predictive validation through twenty four experts and blind validation through nine employees working in IT field. The results show that the proposed system was found to be run without any errors, offered a friendly user interface and its suggestions matching user expectations with 95.8%. It also can help project managers, systems' engineers, systems' developers, consultants, and planners in the process of selecting the suitable ISDM. Finally, the results show that the proposed Rule-based Expert System can facilities the selection process especially for new users and non-specialist in Information System field.