Public Sector Priority Setting Using Decision Support Tools

The public sector is in transition in many countries, including New Zealand, and many government departments have been restructured so as to increase transparency and accountability in their decision-making by implementing fundamental changes to governance, accountability regimes and information systems. New frameworks are also needed for tasks such as priority setting, and this paper describes the framework developed to assist the then NZ Ministry of Agriculture (MAF) in setting priorities for the allocation of research funds. This comprised a participative process including a series of workshops using both GroupSystems software for electronic meeting support and Visual Interactive Sensitivity Analysis (VISA) software to facilitate a multi-criteria decision analysis.