Designing an Expert System for Information Technology Sourcing Decision Making (Case study: Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology (IranDoc))

One of the questions that institutions in the field of information technology are facing is how to get the services, products, equipment and materials they need? Relying on internal capabilities and resources (insourcing) or benefiting from external capabilities and resources (outsourcing) are the two main methods of acquiring services, products, equipment and materials needed by a business to achieve its goals. It is generally referred to as sourcing. Lack of financial resources and provision of expert human resources is one of the main issues of institutions in sourcing information technology systems, services and equipment, which has caused institutions to look for a pre-reliable and systematic procedure to choose between sourcing methods in response to this question. Based on this issue, this research aims to design an expert system for information technology sourcing decisions and apply it to the study of the Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology (IranDoc) as a case. In order to achieve this goal, in the first step, 1- identifying the factors affecting the sourcing of information technology systems, services and equipment, and 2- designing an expert system for making information technology sourcing decisions. In this step, by using collection tools including library study and nominal group with experts and decision makers in the field of information technology in order to make a sourcing decision between the two options of external sourcing (outsourcing) and internal sourcing (insourcing), the legal and decision making framework in the form of a The expert system was designed and presented with tacit knowledge extraction, inference engine, comparison and prioritization structure, legal structure and execution process components. In the second step, in order to show the validity, the design and implementation of the prototype was considered as one of the validation methods. In this step, after designing the prototype, the decision-making process for 10 potential activities (projects) of IranDoc Information Technology Center was used. The results showed that the designed expert system meets the objectives of the research. The results of this research as a whole can provide a structured model for using the benefits of various sourcing mechanisms and reducing financial risks and providing human resources to the policy makers and managers and improve the current situation