IT outsourcing through group decision-making based on the principles of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy theory

Abstract

The past decade has seen tremendous growth in the global use of information technology (IT) as a pivotal tool to gain competitive advantage. Organisations and enterprises often seek to optimise their IT-related operations by using the best available internal and external resources to achieve the greatest profit or output attainable through this technology. This has led to the increasingly important role of IT outsourcing in today's managerial and administrative approaches. The present study proposes an IT outsourcing model that employs an interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy approach. The proposed approach uses the Shannon entropy in intuitionistic fuzzy environment to determine the weight of experts and those of IT outsourcing criteria. These weights are then used to obtain the aggregate expert opinion matrix based on the principles of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers. The intuitionistic fuzzy TOPSIS is used to prioritise the suppliers. The proposed model is implemented for a governmental organisation with seven supplier- and six IT outsourcing criteria.