Enhancing knowledge-based systems with decision support tools: a case study in the marketing domain

Knowledge-based systems have been successfully used in many areas, but in the domain of strategic planning, especially marketing planning, success has been less than satisfactory. Strategic decision making requires sophisticated analysis and expert judgements, and the use of knowledge-based systems in this domain, although having advantages, has been shown to have a number of limitations. The authors of this article encountered these limitations through their involvement in the development of a system for strategic marketing planning. The original purpose of the research was to develop a knowledge-based system to support the strategic marketing planning process but it was found that a knowledge-based system alone was not suitable for some types of the tasks. The system emerged as a hybrid system that integrates knowledge base technology with decision support tools. It was found that this type of hybrid system produces better results when supporting various types of decision-making tasks. This article examines the characteristics of the strategic planning domain and discusses why a knowledge base system, as a single system, has failed to tackle this complex planning process. The article then discusses the selection of the strategic marketing planning model used for the hybrid system, the overall system architecture, and how an enhanced operational research technique was used to introduce structure into a largely subjective process of assigning importance to various marketing factors. It concludes with some lessons learned through the development of the system and some results from experienced users.