A Data Envelopment Analysis Approach for Performance Evaluation of IT Products

This paper deals with performance evaluation of IT (information technology) products. We adopt the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to explore the relative efficiencies among IT products. Notebook computers are used as our study vehicle. According to the usage and applications of notebook computers, we consider four types of scenarios: commuter, home user, student user, as well as traveler. Experiment designs for 26 notebook computers are then conducted to evaluate the technical efficiencies accordingly. Our experiment results indicate that price of a notebook computer is not directly related to its performance. With the help of slack analysis, suggestions are made to improve the inefficiencies of poor notebook computers.