THE EVALUATION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROJECTS: A FUZZY MULTICRITERIA DECISION-MAKING APPROACH

Abstract

This paper presents a fuzzy set-based approach to the evaluation of information technology (IT) projects. We assume a multi-criteria decision-making framework, where sets of general and domain-specific criteria are used to judge the relative performance of alternative technologies. The methodology was originally developed for DIAS.net, an EU project aiming at the development of the Information Society in insular and isolated regions of Europe. In this paper, we present many aspects of our evaluation framework, including the synthesis of evaluation teams, the assessment of the importance of criteria, the evaluation of the performance of the alternatives and the final ranking and selection of projects. The methodology presented has the innovative feature of embodying techniques of fuzzy sets theory into the classical multi-criteria decision analysis. This combination enables us to handle efficiently the subjectiveness that often characterizes expert judgements on a decision problem. Fuzzy linguistic terms, such as "poor," "fair," "very important," etc. are proposed for assessing the relative merit of alternatives and criteria. The paper concludes by exploring the potentiality of the above methodology in providing a flexible and robust IT evaluation framework.