QUALITATIVE DECISION EXPLANATION FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENT

Abstract

Many business decisions involve issues that are not amenable to quantitative measures and analysis. One such domain of decisions is large-scale investments in information technology. Traditional capital budgeting methods have not proven effective. In this paper, we present an alternative paradigm for qualitative decision analysis, embodied in the artificial intelligence program: VOTE. We describe the technology investment domain in general, and how VOTE models goals and agents in this domain. We apply the VOTE model to a specific decision taken from a. study of a major information technology investment decision.