Research On Information System Outsourcing Supplier Selection Based On Heterogeneous Multi-attribute Decision Making

With the rapid development of internet technology and modern information technology, informationization has become an important way to increase the enterprise resource utilization rate and accelerate the process of company modernization. In order to reduce cost, focus on the development of enterprises’ core business and improve the specialization of information system, more and more enterprises choose information system outsourcing to promote the reform of enterprise informationization. The performance of information system outsourcing is closely connected with the scope of information system outsourcing, the selection of supplier and the control and management in the process of outsourcing. The selection of supplier is directly related to the success of the entire system outsourcing. The factors evaluating the suppliers always include quantitative and qualitative indices. Meanwhile, the evaluation with a single type data cannot meet the demand of accurate evaluation on issues. Comparing with individual decision making, group decision can effectively improve the objectivity, correctness and fairness of final outcome. Therefore, it is greatly important that the method of heterogeneous multi-attribute group decision making is applied to supplier selection of the information system outsourcing. In this paper, an expanded PROMETHEE method, which is short for Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation, is proposed and applied to a group decision making problem of information system outsourcing supplier selection with heterogeneous multiple attributes. The main contents of this article are as follows:(1) This paper describes the definitions, classifications, advantages and disadvantages of information system outsourcing in detail. According to existing research on factors influencing the performance of information system outsourcing, we choose and explain seven factors that may influence the selection of information system outsourcing supplier, including the price rationality, the relationship with clients, quality, technical, professional performance of sales personnel, security and commercial reputation.(2) This paper systematically introduces the related basic theories of heterogeneous multiple attribute group decision making, and apply them to fuzzy PROMETHEE method. With incomplete attribute weight information which is given by the decision makers, the objective and subjective attribute weights are obtained by maximizing net flows.(3) By defining a transformation formula, the net flows are transformed into objective preference information, which may avoid the possible affect resulting from the different evaluation standards given by decision makers. Subsequently, the decision makers’ weights and the group preference order are derived by a fuzzy linear programming method.(4) Applying the fuzzy PROMETHEE method to a real case of information system outsourcing supplier selection, we illustrate the effectiveness and the feasibility of the proposed method in this paper. Furthermore, the comparison analyses, including comparing with the extended TOPSIS and weighted average aggregation method, are conducted to further describe the superiorities of the proposed method.