Decision making support (DSS)
What is this for and who is it aimed at?
The software aims to help city managers responsible for promoting cultural heritage tourism make decisions about which promotional ITC strategy or which package of e-services to adopt by evaluating the consequences of investments in e-services and related projects.
What kinds of decisions are we addressing?
The software supports complex decisions that need local knowledge and involve some factors that are difficult to quantify.
What tools are available to aid decision making?
There are two main decision support systems: cost benefit analysis (CBA) and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA).
1. CBA evaluates alternatives in terms of social welfare. All the factors being considered have to be priced.
2. MCDA evaluates alternatives using qualitative factors that are weighted in terms of their relative importance in the opinion of the decision makers.
Why we recommend MCDA?
In practice, decision makers having to decide between different ITC strategies would find it impossible to price all the factors that need to be taken into account.
What is Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis?
Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) deals with the process of making decisions in the presence of multiple objectives. A decision maker has to choose one alternative among a set of alternatives, using two or more criteria. Usually there is no alternative that performs better than all of the others according to all criteria. Therefore, the solution must be a compromise.
For example, when someone decides to buy a car, he usually considers several criteria, like price, speed, petrol consumption, prestige, safety, etc. In most of the cases there is no car available that performs best in all the above criteria. Therefore, the final choice depends on the the desion maker's preference regarding these criteria.
MCDA provides a structured approach to such decisions. The expected outcome is therefore based the decison maker's intimate local knowledge and on his or her preferences.
ISAAC and the relevance of MCDA to e-services and the promotion of cultural heritage?
ISAAC is a new EU project that aims to promote European cultural heritage by developing a user-centered Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Platform, which offers integrated electronic services. The project evaluates the advantages of and the barriers to the introduction of integrated e-services. Several European cities have introduced or are in the process of developing new e-services. The pace the these services are being introduced varies a great deal, principally because of uncertainty about the potential benefits of these services for various groups of stakeholders. Consequently there is a need for way of systematically analysing the pros and cons of different levels of investment in e-services in the urban tourist sector in Europe.