A Case Study on the Multicriteria Selection of Software Components

When determining an appropriate level of IT investments (e.g., software components), managers have to take into consideration given business processes and strategic objectives as well as a variety of potential technologies while ensuring the cost-efficient usage of limited resources. As a missing alignment and/or poor IT investment decisions may entail corporate failure, they experience a growing pressure to prove the value of IT investments by defining an optimal IT portfolio, but often lack proper decision support methods and tools. This paper evaluates the performance of two popular methods by means of a case study and compares them to a new one, namely the Atana approach, that allows to (semi)automate software investment decisions. The comparison reveals that the latter better supports decision makers in making investments that more precisely target the company´s business needs by allowing decision makers to interactively determine and continually optimize IT investments according to the corporate business processes and multiple (strategic) objectives.