This decision-making tool enables managerial teams to make considered, deliberate judgments about complex situations that comprise both quantitative and qualitative components. AHP has slowly gained favor in corporate and government circles during the past three decades, leading Saaty to form Expert Choice, a Pittsburgh-based software company. The latest version of the software assists executives in developing a hierarchical tree of goals, priorities, tradeoffs and alternatives. The model integrates not only the financial side of a problem but also value-based opinion aspects by asking executives to assign weights to goals and objectives. By graphically illustrating the interplay among different goals and opinions, the software points the way toward a decision, even listing priorities in order of importance.
Executives can then vote on courses of action.
Debra Stouffer, deputy CIO for IT reform at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, uses Expert Choice for the agency's IT capital planning and investment. We save valuable time by reviewing the projects in a portfolio framework and by terminating useless projects before they drain valuable resources. We have better control over our projects by managing them continuously rather than periodically. And we don't have to start from scratch every year because our IT portfolio model becomes a living representation of our IT organization. Stouffer finds Expert Choice particularly valuable for IT projects.