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, the authors 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. The present approach is easy to implement in stand-alone personal computers and GSS platforms. The authors illustrate this with a real-world problem on a prototype implementation.