A decision support system for selection of public information technology investment projects

Public investments are implemented through projects. In addition to the fact that ICT projects require highly qualified human resources, they also have some technical requirements such as change of user habits, usability, flexibility and sustainability. For this reason, it is not easy to successfully implement investment projects in this sector, and projects that can be implemented may not provide the foreseen added value. Since the public resources that can be allocated to ICT projects are limited, selection of the projects with the highest added value and the highest probability of success becomes a necessity. Since this selection has too many criteria, multi-criteria decision-making methods should be used for project prioritization, and the need to provide interactive information to experts in project selection makes the existence of a decision support system essential. Although project prioritization is a subject that has been studied extensively in the literature, limited work has been done in the public sector of Turkey. In this study, prioritization of ICT projects in the public sector of Turkey has been made by using a decision support system with the help of multi-criteria decision making methods. With the help of an interactive interface offered to experts, the prioritization made by the system was allowed to be revised by the users, and the feedback received regarding the reason for user changes was aimed to give an idea about the performance ratio of the system. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used for the weighting of criteria among multi-criteria decision making methods, and TOPSIS method was used to determine the final priority order of the projects.