The Quantification of Decision Support Benefits Within the Context of Value Analysis

Traditional cost-benefit approaches to evaluating the effectiveness of decision support systems are generally regarded as inadequate. More recent approaches account for the intangible benefit overlooked by traditional cost-benefit analysis, but still attempt to express benefits in terms of costs. This paper focuses on a value analysis. It advocates a methodology for (1) identifying significant intangible benefits for a specific decision support system (2) quantifying these benefits in value terms, and (3) establishing a decision rule for identifying the significance of the proposed system. Finally, an alternative approach at deriving the benefit utilities is examined.