Collaborative Value Modelling in corporate contexts with MACBETH

Abstract In complex organizational choices with consequences spread all over the organization, good management practice recommends the auscultation of the points of view of people from different operational areas, to inform a final decision-making body. In large corporations such an internal participatory process may easily involve a large number of people, however time and scheduling constraints are not compatible with gathering them together in presential meetings to reach an alignment around key decision objectives. One of these cases was the selection of a new Enterprise Management System (EMS) for GALP ENERGIA (a Portuguese energy company). The aim of this paper is to report on how a socio-technical process was designed and took place under the “Collaborative Value Modelling” framework, combining technical elements of the MACBETH multicriteria evaluation method with two social settings: firstly, Web-Delphi to elicit individual qualitative judgements from a large number of collaborators from the different departments of GALP ENERGIA; followed by a Decision Conference where a small steering committee used the knowledge collected in the Delphi to inform the construction of a quantitative model to compare the EMS alternatives proposed by information technology companies. To detail our rationale, we focus on the qualitative swing-weighting questioning MACBETH mode, implemented in the Welphi information technology platform in which GALP collaborators provided individual weighting judgements, and then in the decision conferencing for final weighting of criteria by the steering committee. The main contribution of this paper is on detailing how, through the “Collaborative Value Modeling” framework, it is possible to promote “dialogue” among a large group of participants in a corporate setting, therefore promoting alignment and increasing model acceptance within the company.