Title: Proposal for using analysis of software agents usability in organisations

Authors: Mariusz Żytniewski; Bartosz Kopka

Addresses: University of Economics in Katowice, 1 Maja 50, 40-287 Katowice, Poland ' University of Economics in Katowice, 1 Maja 50, 40-287 Katowice, Poland

Abstract: The aim of the paper is to analyse agent solutions on the Polish market using a proposed qualitative research method (AUKP - agent usefulness and knowledge propagation analysis method) that allows for assessment of the usability and degree of knowledge diffusion between the man and computer with reference to the use of agent systems. As will be shown in the paper, previous studies presented in the literature on software agents largely refer to agent metrics describing such properties as autonomy, communication and cooperation, without sufficiently addressing the issue of knowledge transfer between the agent and user and the role of agents in business processes. For the purpose of conducting research, the paper presents a theoretical model of research showing the importance of its different stages. Further, it presents a formal model of research which was used to develop a set of indicators to evaluate the usability of examined agents. The last part discusses the results obtained in an experiment consisting in examining three interface agents used in Polish firms to support their business processes.

Keywords: agent usability; agent usefulness; knowledge propagation; performance evaluation; user impact; software agents; Poland; knowledge diffusion; knowledge transfer; human-computer interaction; HCI; business processes.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCISTUDIES.2016.077140

International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies, 2016 Vol.5 No.2, pp.197 - 215

Received: 04 Jun 2015
Accepted: 09 Jan 2016

Published online: 21 Jun 2016 *

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