Conclusion

 

Chapter 2 - Optimal Purchase Decision Criteria for Information Technology
Managing IT in Government, Business & Communities
by Gerry Gingrich (ed)
Idea Group Publishing 2003

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Decision makers may further modify this factor-rating approach to IT purchases to fit their special needs. For example, instead of using monitor size as alternatives, we may use three criteria of "best," "good," or "poor," with a collection of brand names and monitor types in each category, thus decreasing the clutter of the table. The advantages of using this optimal purchasing heuristics are described below:

• Separate Subjective from Objective Processes: The assignment of weight and benefit scores is where the expertise and subjective needs of decision makers are captured. Beyond that, the work can be delegated to assistants to calculate measurements described in Section 3.

• Allows Automation: Any structured decision-making process can be automated. The weight and benefit scores can be incorporated into a spreadsheet to simply calculation.

• Simplify Committee Work: Although they are without formal quantitative analysis, our experiments with students show that the weight and benefit scores assigned by a committee is relatively close to the averages of those assigned by individual committee members. This result implies a more efficient way to generate "consensus" of a group in making IT purchasing decisions.

Operational definition is used to quantify qualitative attributes, and the Qualitative Factor Rating method has been used to quantify site selection decisions for decades. In this paper we proposed improvements that (1) separate cost from benefit quantification to allow a two dimensional graphical analysis, specifically to allow the application of Pareto Principle, and (2) separate the subjective view of "benefit" from a relatively objective "cost" in order to allow at least part of process to be delegated to assistants.

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