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An intelligent decision support system for information system project selection
Abstract
With the rapid growth of information technology, selecting Information System (IS) projects that further organizational objectives has become a complex task. Some of the factors that must be included in the decision process include, among others, the risk of the portfolio of projects chosen, the tangible and intangible benefits derived from projects, resources necessary to develop the projects and corporate goals. Scoring and ranking techniques currently used to IS project selection do not address all these multiple factors adequately. The existing methods neither facilitate the inclusion of corporate priorities nor do they guarantee that the set of projects chosen will be implementable with the organization's resources. This research examines in depth the complexities of the problem of IS project selection and presents a decision aid based on the multiple objective technique of goal programming. The feasibility of this approach is tested using project selection data from a large organization. To fully utilize this decision aid, it must be incorporated as part of a Decision Support System for IS planning. Traditional Decision Support Systems have imbedded decision models that are built by staff intermediaries and require their expertise to use them. Consequently, it has been found that staff intermediaries rather than managers use these decision models. To remedy this problem, researchers are exploring techniques of Artificial Intelligence to design systems that can help a manager formulate the decision model from fundamentals. This research examines the feasibility of developing an intelligent system that can assist a manager to formulate an IS project selection decision model. The approach to intelligent model formulation adopted in this research is to combine structural knowledge about modeling with domain dependent knowledge. Hence, the knowledge base of the system contains information on IS project selection and principles of goal programming. A prototype model formulation system is developed and tested using Prolog. The system can guide a management science naive decision maker in formulating a decision model for IS project selection.
Subject Area
Business community|Information Systems
Recommended Citation
Santhanam, Radhika, "An intelligent decision support system for information system project selection" (1989). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9004706.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9004706