مدل تصمیم برای انتخاب IT توسط APH ادغام شده با TOPSIS-Grey

ABSTRACT A decision model for information technology selection using AHP integrated TOPSIS-Grey: The case of content management systems

Information systems (IS) are critical instruments for companies to achieve competitive advantage, organizational learning and innovation [3,40]. One of the important aspects of IS management is the selection of the most suitable software from many competing alternatives [48]. In the context of organizational IS, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and supply chain management, are the pioneering applications that grasp attention [27,51]. However, in the recent years, content management systems have become a vital technology for companies both for internal and external communications. With the emergence of internet, building and managing websites and establishing an efficient communication with employers, customers and suppliers has become an inevitable strategy for companies. As a response to management difficulties of websites which contain many pages, CMS software has emerged in mid-1990s for easy management of the content [6]. As a core definition, CMSs are software applications for creating, publishing, editing and managing content, but as new web technologies emerge, the CMS software gained new features and functionalities [26,36]. Today, CMSs are widely used by the news and media organizations, e-commerce websites, libraries, broadcasting and film industry, and educational institutions to handle the content efficiently [25].

Content management systems need considerable financial investment for implementation and bear some potential risks. Thus the selection of the proper CMS solution is a critical issue for organizations. The selection process can be modelled as a multi criteria decision making (MCDM) problem which can handle various different and conflicting criteria for making a selection among predetermined decision alternatives. The literature does not provide studies that directly focus on CMS selection; however MSCD methods are widely used in the field of information systems selection. Some recent methods can be listed as follows: Weighted Sum Method [5,35] Analytic Hierarchy Process [46,39], Analytic Network Process [57,21], TOPSIS [34] and ELECTRE [49].

In this study AHP and TOPSIS methods are integrated and extended so as to utilize grey numbers for the evaluation of the alternatives. IS selection decisions contain high levels of intangibility and uncertainty which make them difficult to assess and quantify.

What is more, the reliability of the technology, capabilities and life time of new technologies increase the uncertainty and make the decision more complex. In the traditional formulation of MCDM problems exact numbers are used to represent a judgment or a score. However, in many practical cases, usage of exact numbers may not be possible, the data can be imprecise, or the decision makers might be unable to assign exact numerical values to the evaluation. In such cases, Grey systems theory, developed by Deng [12] provides a practical alternative to handle uncertainty. Grey systems provide a methodology for problems involving incomplete and poor information using grey numbers. In this context, grey refers to partially known and partially unknown information and a grey number is a number whose exact value is unknown, but a range within which the value lies is known.

In this study, AHP and TOPSIS methods are integrated to determine the most suitable CMS alternative. AHP, known for its flexibility and ability to decompose a decision problem, is used to determine the weights of the criteria and these weights are later used in TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) technique which takes into account the best and worst ideals when evaluating the alternatives. While the AHP part of the study uses classical approach, the alternative evaluations utilize Grey numbers in order to handle the uncertainty and vagueness. TOPSIS-Grey is used to process the evaluations expressed as grey numbers and to provide a ranking for the alternatives.

The inspiration for this study is to provide decision support to the web publishers in selecting content management system via a systematic approach. When considering the large body of literature, it can be concluded that to the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to identify CMS selection criteria and utilize grey multi criteria decision making technique in a CMS selection problem. The sensitivity analysis are applied for the criteria weight and it is concluded that the proposed method provide robust results.

Finally, different distance functions are applied to detect the effect of the distance functions on the results. When the proposed method is compared with the existing studies in the literature, it can be concluded that the proposed method can incorporate uncertainty in a practical way using Grey numbers and more accurate results can be acquired with the integration of AHP and TOPSIS methods.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the relevant literature on information systems selection and Grey theory is reviewed. TOPSIS-Grey technique is explained in Section 3. The literature review on CMS and decision criteria for CMS selection are expressed in Section 4. The application study of the proposed methodology to a real life company is presented in Section 5. Finally in Section 6 conclusions are given.