A framework for software vendor selection by applying Inconsistency and Conflict Removal (ICR) method

Abstract

In a software ecosystem, companies’ stakeholders make various decisions and perform various tasks to ensure the strategic and architectural goals of the company. Analyzing vendor capabilities and making decisions to select software vendors requires expert professionals. To analyze vendors’ capabilities and accessing them according to the company’s strategic and architectural goals is presently an ad-hoc and manual process. Presently, there is no systematic process for ‘vendor analysis and selection’ specifically for the software industry. Therefore, this study introduces a novel framework which elaborates all the tasks required for vendor proposal evaluation. It also includes the automatic detection of inconsistencies and conflicts prevalent during this process. A new method called ‘Inconsistency and Conflict Removal (ICR)’ is proposed as part of this framework. ICR automates the process of spotting inconsistencies and conflicts by taking scores of vendor capabilities as input reported by different decision-makers. Further, to illustrate this framework, ‘a case of Hospital’ has been considered. This study provides valuable knowledge that would facilitate organizations in software vendor selection. It will lead to substantial savings in terms of economics, such as actual costs, time, and improved administrative processes.