Organizing and visualizing information for selecting functions to develop technical service support software

Some issues regarding the procurement of information systems including software have been pointed out from the buyer's viewpoint. The purpose of this research is to provide a series of techniques for buyers to select functions and outsourcing system development. The proposed techniques are effective for organizing and visualizing information on system requirements with weighted importance, technical specifications of software, and cost for software development. In addition to the above, the ordering value, derived from fulfillment and weighted importance, are helpful for buyers to make cost-effective decisions to develop software function sets. We apply the proposed techniques to a case study of technical service support software in the wireless communications industry in order to evaluate their effectiveness. The results show the advantage of treating the weighted importance taking into account timeliness for functional availability and visualizing fulfillment of the buyer's requirements.