The expert system responded by classifying her information needs and, after asking Carolyn to confirm its analysis, the system made specific recommendations. Users may not have access to beneficial technologies. Armed with the shipping data Eric's group had assembled, Carolyn was guided to key decision technology components, that is, models and modeling environments. Without D-Net, the problem would have been far more difficult. Eric's group would have to identify publishers and vendors of each relevant technology or be forced to adapt software they had previously acquired or inherited from other projects.
Most technologies require specific hardware and software configurations.
Under the status quo, decision technology acquisitions must be compatible with the Consumer's IT architecture. Thus, a modeling environment only available on Windows NT, for example, would be incompatible with Eric's Macintosh platform. This problem is also found in the context of platform configurations. A model may be programmed using features available in a certain release of the modeling environment software which in turn may be limited to a certain release of the operating system. For Carolyn, once she was connected to DecisionNet, compatibility was not a concern.