Multicriteria Decision Making for Evaluating and Selecting Information Systems Projects: A Sustainability Perspective

Abstract

This paper develops a multicriteria analysis method for effectively making the selection decision on information systems (IS) projects for project management in organizations from a sustainability perspective. The triple bottom line principle of sustainability in organizations is carefully considered in formulating the IS project selection process as a multicriteria analysis problem. The subjectiveness of the decision-making process is modelled by linguistic variables approximated by fuzzy numbers. The positive and the negative ideal solution concepts are used to calculate the overall sustainability performance of individual IS projects in a comprehensive manner. A decision support system framework is then constructed with the use of the developed method for facilitating the IS project selection process. Such a system can provide organizations with an effective mechanism for comprehensively evaluating available IS projects from a sustainability perspective. An example is presented for demonstrating the flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed method in solving the IS project selection problem.