Social choice aggregation methods for multiple attribute business information system selection

Abstract

This paper targets the area of business Information System (IS) decision making, where accountable and understandable decision support is needed for all involved stakeholders. When information systems investments are evaluated based on applying different dimensions or attributes to the available alternatives the results have to be consolidated into a single ranking to provide a base for the investment decision. This consolidation itself is a multiple attribute decision problem. In this work the situation is perceived from a social choice point of view; a number of voting rules are described that can be applied to this task. The properties of the results they deliver are analyzed in an ex post case study, and are thereafter explored for typical business IS decisions in simulation analysis. From the latter, results include distance information based on the aggregation results for the set of considered voting rules, which, e.g, can be used to select a method mix for validating ranking outcomes. For the case study, results include rankings of the voting rules being contrasted to the outcome of the standard ranking and scoring technique applied in practice.