A Sustainability‑Based Multi‑Criteria Decision Approach for Information Systems Project Selection

Abstract

An effective approach for evaluating and selecting information systems (IS) projects in project management from a sustainability perspective is highly desirable in contemporary organisations with sustainable objectives. Such an approach, however, is absent from the literature. This paper presents a multi‑criteria analysis approach for effectively evaluating and selecting IS projects for project management in organisations based on their sustainability performance under environmental, economic, and social dimensions. Such an approach considers the subjective and uncertain nature of the IS project selection process using linguistic variables approximated by fuzzy numbers and effectively aggregates the subjective assessments for determining the overall sustainable performance of individual IS projects across all the selection criteria and their associated sub‑criteria. The proposed multi‑criteria decision‑making approach provides organisations with a proactive mechanism for effectively evaluating and selecting IS projects from a sustainability perspective. An IS project selection problem is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.