Assessing the quality of institutional DSS

Effectively assessing decision support systems (DSS) quality has long been a difficult challenge to developers and users. Despite the difficulty, the need to justify substantial investments in DSS projects motivates academics and practitioners alike to attempt continuously to improve quality assessment procedures and methods. Institutional DSS are likely to exacerbate the need for quality assessment because they tend to be larger and more expensive than personal DSS. Institutional DSS, by definition, are used by many people throughout the organization. It is very likely, in such cases, that users will have different perspectives, objectives and expectations from the system. Discussion and comparison of existing methods to assess DSS quality are presented, followed by a proposal for the use of the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method as a more viable alternative for institutional DSS quality assessment. A case study is used to demonstrate the use of AHP for institutional DSS quality assessment in practice.