Methods for information system project selection: an experimental study of AHP and SMART

Presents the findings of an experimental study of the perceived goodness of two multi-criteria methods for IS project selection: the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the simple multi-attribute rating technique (SMART). Student subjects were asked to solve either a simple or a complex problem, by either using any method (the control batches were not given training on AHP or SMART) or by using AHP or SMART. The task was to select one project from a number of proposed projects, given a set of scores for each proposed project on each of the selection criteria. The experimental results show that SMART is generally preferable to AHP, particularly for selection problems involving a large number of alternatives and selection criteria