A QUALITATIVE DISCRIMINANT PROCESS FOR SCORING AND RANKING IN GROUP SUPPORT SYSTEMS

Group support systems (GSS) are increasingly being used within organizations to support group work. One area of-support that is often desired is the scoring and ranking of alternatives on qualitative/subjective domains. In this article, we present a new, conceptual approach, the qualitative discriminant process, for scoring and ranking in GSS. This approach is based on well-established decision analysis techniques. It significantly advances the state of the art of GSS by addressing four common limitations: (1) the inability to deal with vagueness of human decision makers in articulating preferences; (2) difficulties in mapping qualitative evaluation to numeric estimates; (3) problems in aggregating individual preferences into meaningful group preference; and (4) the lack of simple, user-friendly techniques for dealing with a large number of decision alternatives. Our approach is easy to implement in stand-alone personal computers and GSS platforms. We illustrate this with a real-world problem on a prototype implementation.