15 October 2012. Researchers from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's Facultad de Informática, Lucas Grossi and Jose A. Calvo-Manzano, have applied a systematic review protocol to select information technology (IT) suppliers and have defined 16 evaluation criteria for supplier selection. These new criteria are to be used as part of a future decision model for selecting IT suppliers.
The results of this research have been published in the Revista Ibérica de Sistemas y Tecnologías de la Información, RISTI, No. 8, 12/2011, published by AISTI (Asociación Ibérica de Sistemas y Tecnologías de la Información).
The systematic review related to decision-making on IT supplier selection was conducted using the protocol proposed by Biolchini in 2005. This protocol has five primary characteristics related to the systematic review process, ending with a statistical analysis of the primary studies to output results and also test the quality of the selected papers.
Research developed at the Facultad de Informática suggests a major shift in evaluation criteria and their relative importance compared with other studies. Using the results of the systematic review developed by the authors of this paper, 16 IT supplier selection criteria have been defined.
These new evaluation criteria will be used as part of a decision model for selecting IT suppliers that is to be developed by the researchers in the future.
Review characteristics
The experts conducted the review by searching documents related to decision making on IT supplier selection, including initiatives and reports on this issue.
The search was conducted on specialized sources such as the European Journal of Operational Research, IEEE Software or Software Process: Improvement and Practice, in which Grossi and Calvo-Manzano found a total of 52 articles linked to IT and information systems (IS).
Most of these studies mention general ideas on the decision-making process related to IT suppliers.
For example, 71% propose the design of a special-purpose decision-making model and show how to select the best alternative according to a number of defined criteria.
Other papers (23%) analyse the decision-making process. Of these, 4% evaluate the use of decision-making process primitives. One particular study (2%) lists articles related to the IT supplier decision-making process.
Of the reviewed studies, 59% were specifically related to IT and 27% to IS.
Additionally, most used a mixture of decision-making process models (such as Analytic Hierarchy Process or AHP and PROMETHEE).
Need for more knowledge
In the first place, the results of the study suggest that there are not many IT supplier selection decision-making studies, as only 52 primary studies were identified, and not all of them were specifically related to the definition of a IT supplier selection decision model.
Additionally, most of the studies (71%) related to a specific decision-making model design did not develop a full model for use in the IT field. According to Grossi and Calvo-Manzano, this is a motivation for further research.
In actual fact, using the results of this systematic review, the Facultad de Informática researchers have already predefined 16 criteria for IT supplier selection based on the list of 23 criteria defined by Dickson in 1966.
The researchers will use these new criteria as part of a decision model for selecting IT suppliers to be developed in the future.
Service quality assurance
Recently, outsourcing, a term referring to "the contractual relationship with a specialized services supplier" has played a major role on the IT market, and its importance is growing all the time.
The concept of outsourcing gained widespread acceptance in the 1980s, and trend analysts like Morgan & Chambers predict annual growth rate of about 10% for outsourcing.
But, even though the popularity of IT outsourcing has grown in recent decades, many outsourcing agreements have been discontinued.
Experts believe that the factors contributing to the failure of these projects are poor management and requirements definition, lack of comprehensive evaluations, deficient supplier selection and contracts, poor technology selection procedures and uncontrolled requirements changes.
Most project failures could have been avoided if contractors learned to understand decision problems, better analysed decisions and used better judgement.
Therefore, the scientific decision-making process in IT outsourcing supplier selection is very important for increasing the success rate of outsourcing and thus guaranteeing the optimal operation of IT in environments where it is necessary.
Reference
Calvo Manzano Villalon José Antonio, Gonçalves Grossi Lucas. Análisis de decisiones en la selección de proveedores de Tecnologías de la Información: Una revisión sistémica. Revista Ibérica de Sistemas y Tecnologías de la Información, RISTI, No. 8, 12/2011, published by AISTI (Asociación Ibérica de Sistemas y Tecnologías de la Información.
Fig 1. Overview of the research process. Source: Facultad de Informática, UPM.
