Consensus with the Analytic Hierarchy Process at Dar Al-Hekma, Saudi Arabia (original) (raw)
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The Analytic Hierarchy Process at Dar Al-Hekma, Saudi Arabia
Interfaces, 2003
I designed and implemented a multicriteria group decision-making model based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process to select the best candidates to send overseas for graduate studies, eventually becoming teachers at the newly created Dar Al-Hekma women's college in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The paper highlights the model together with the challenges involved in making a scientific application of an OR method that proves to be robust in a highly political environment. Its application does not require from the user an understanding of the sophisticated albeit transparent theory that underlies the methodology. It is user friendly and involves simple constructions in conformity with what people actually do using logic and discussion to express their opinions in a collective effort to make a decision. Its outcome creates public trust in the management of the college. 1. Dar Al-Hekma College Until 1998, the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) was the only authority in Saudi Arabia that was responsible for higher education. Education is provided free of charge in Saudi Arabia. Enrolled students are paid a monthly allowance until they graduate. However, as demand for higher education exceeds the capacity of public universities and other public colleges, MOHE is now giving permission to the private sector to provide higher education through non-profit organizations.
Group Decision Making in Higher Education Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process
1997
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) can be applied to those situations in higher education where a group must evaluate a large number of alternatives. The suggested approach is illustrated using a case study that considers the evaluation of academic research papers at Villanova University. Following the discussion of this successful case study, a second example indicates how the AHP can be applied to the more complex problem of institution-wide strategic planning. These examples clearly demonstrate that the AHP approach is a versatile tool that can be applied to a wide range of important academic evaluation problems.
Analytical Hierarchy Process in Multiple Decisions Making for Higher Education in Malaysia
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2013
Analytical Hierarchy Process originally a mathematical tool is used to develop instrument to upgrade the status of qualified higher education institutions. The AHP approach is a consensus, inclusive base decision without disregarding any opposing views. It simplifies a complex multi decision making process, makes it more systematic, and introduces transparency while saving cost and resources. The AHP begins with building a profile for educational excellent. Within the framework, three laye rs of components with different criteria and indicators were built on top of each other. The criteria and indicators are changeable. The instrument is generic, flexible and applicable to any institution.
How To Make A Decision: The Analytic Hierarchy Process
Policy makers at all levels of decision making in organizations use multiple criteria to analyze their complex problems. Multicriteria thinking is used formally to facilitate their decision making. Through trade-offs it clarifies the advantages and disadvantages of policy options under circumstances of risk and uncertainty. It is also a tool vital to forming corporate strategies needed for effective competition. Nearly all of us, in one way or another, have been brought up to believe that clearheaded logical thinking is our only sure way to face and solve problems. We also believe that our feelings and our judgments must be subjected to the acid test of deductive thinking. But experience suggests that deductive thinking is not natural. Indeed, we have to practice, and for a long time, before we can do it well. Since complex problems usually have many related factors, traditional logical thinking leads to sequences of ideas that are so tangled that their interconnections are not readily discerned. The lack of a coherent procedure to make decisions is especially troublesome when our intuition alone cannot help us to determine which of several options is the most desirable, or the least objectionable, and neither logic nor intuition are of help. Therefore, we need a way to determine which objective outweighs another, both in the near and long terms. Since we are concerned with real-life problems we must recognize the necessity for trade-offs to best serve the common interest. Therefore, this process should also allow for consensus building and compromise. Individual knowledge and experience are inadequate in making decisions concerning the welfare and quality of life for a group. Participation and debate are needed both among individuals and between the groups affected. Here two aspects of group decision making have to be considered. The first is a rather minor complication, namely, the discussion and exchange within the group to reach some
The Gulf Cooperation Council Countries are challenged by unprecedented labor problems. These countries suffer from unemployment problems in spite of the fact that they offer jobs for millions of immigrants. Non indigenous fill 95% of the private sector jobs in these countries. Saudi Arabia as the largest country in terms of area and population suffers the most from this unemployment problem. In cooperation with the ministry of Labor , executive MBA(EMBA) students from KAU focused on a number of these problems, defined them, explored solutions and prioritized these solutions from the point of view of officials in the ministry, employers and job seekers. The Analytic Hierarchy Process was chosen as the methodology to help the decision makers in the ministry decide on which strategy to take to address these problems. The objective is to promote the use of AHP in the process of governmental decision making by introducing it via the activity of Service Learning
Collective Decision-Making: the Analytic Hierarchy Process
Social Policy & Administration, 1992
Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a method to improve decision making whose application here is to complex environments. "A.H.P." involves structuring a decision into a hierarchy, determining relative priorities for the elements in the hierarchy, and combining the numbers into overall weights estimating each decision outcome. The need for decision aids such as AHP, is supported by the literature, which suggests that even experts can contend with only limited amounts ofinformation and tend to arrive at decisions in a simple fashion. A H P allows for using more information to make decisions in more complex ways. This leads to more coherent decisions. In the case presented A H P helped a committee make resource allocation decisions in an urban renewal project in Israel. The example highlights the usefulness of A H P in group settings. Areas of disagreement were easily identified and discussed. This diffused much of the tension typical of these proceedings.
2011
This paper proposes the application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) on female employment in the ministry of foreign Affairs (MOFA). To ensure the validity and reliability of the selection process, MOFA officials sought the expertise of distinguished academic team to perform the selections through more sophisticated methods than the traditional approach of recruiting human resources. The selected academic team opted for the implementation of the well known multi-criteria decision approach, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in a group decision making setting. Team members designed a rubric to conduct the interviews; analyze their results; and a short questionnaire to provide another set of criteria which was incorporated in AHP rating model to prioritize the applicants. The results were highly welcomed by MOFA officials, who unanimously supported the superiority of AHP results.
Employment of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to assess the contributions of management student team members is described. The students perform this assessment as well as the subject constrictor. The assessments are correlated with the individual team role-assignments to making a final determine of the contributions of the individual to the team effort. Using this evaluation technique appears to provide candidate student peer input for evaluations. The results demonstrated that the student ranking is more likely influenced by the relative importance of teaming, computering skills and management and by sub-criteria, communication, innovation, determination and cooperation. The study sheds importance insight into an area of multi-criteria decision making and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). Keywords: AHP, Multi-criteria decision making and pairwise comparisons matrix Introduction Employments of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to assess the contributions of human resources management student team members are described. AHP can be characterized as a multi-criteria decision technique in which qualitative factors are of prime of importance. A model of the problem (teaming contribution) is developed using a hierarchical representation. At the top of the hierarchy is the overall goal or prime objective one is seeking to fulfill. The succeeding lower levels then represent the progressive decomposition of the problem and represent the criteria and sub-criteria. However, this depends on how is complex the decision problem under consideration. The individual team members complete pair-wise comparisons of all entries in each level relative to each of the entries in the next higher
Management practice has tended to focus on uni-dimensional goals such as profit maximization or share value maximization. Analytic tools covered in business schools have also, for the most part, supported this orientation. Management science tools, for example, typically involve seeking optimal solutions based on quantitative and objective criteria. Management problems often have qualitative and subjective criteria embedded in them, however. Also, several stakeholders can be impacted by any one decision, making it important to incorporate various criteria in decision-making. A tool that can incorporate multiple quantitative and qualitative criteria in a meaningful and rational way was developed by Thomas Saaty in the late 70s called the analytic hierarchy process or AHP. In 2008, Saaty received the INFORMS Impact Prize for his development of the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Management scholars as well as practitioners have been arguing for the use of this tool for contentious, ethics-laden oriented or stakeholder-oriented decision-making. The paper advocates for the teaching of AHP in all OR and management science courses. This will enable management students to implement decisions with a broader view.
Universal Access in The Information Society, 2013
Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) is represented by utility and outranking methods. Of the utility models, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is probably the most popular in group-decision support. The social choice theory (SCT) with its voting systems can be efficiently combined with MCDM, and AHP in particular, in various group-decision contexts. This paper investigates two possible contexts where modeling group decisionmaking processes in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) takes place. Being an important part of universal access in the information society, the first context assumes the use of AHP only, associated with two different aggregating techniques to derive the group decision, with and without a consensus. The second context is based on using only SCT systems, i.e., preferential and non-preferential voting systems. The third, novel, approach that is proposed assumes a full AHP application in the first stage to obtain the weights of alternatives and, in the second stage, an interpretation of the AHP's cardinal information as being the ordinal one and the direct application of the SCT voting systems. Comparative analyses show good agreement for the results when the three methodologies are applied as the decision support to ranking by importance (for a group of 14 PhD students) several widely used sources of information for the internet. The method of virtually combining the AHP and SCT voting systems could be efficiently implemented in real decision-making situations in HCI and related sectors, as well as in crosssector settings.