Organization design as expert system design

The information processing view of organization design and development is cast in an expert system framework, in which purposeful organizations with cooperating subunits are viewed as rule-based expert systems. The antecedent to a rule corresponds to information available to the subunit and the consequent of the rule corresponds to actions taken by the subunit. Thus, an organization is viewed as an intelligent, or knowledge-based, system, the design of which is similar, but not identical, to the design of an expert system. A computational example is given and possible extensions are discussed