Enhancing e-Business Decision Making: An Application of Consensus Theory

Abstract

Statistical analysis is the universally accepted method by which sense is created from raw data. Successful requirements determination is often dependent upon the gathering customer data over the Internet, and it may be largely limited to collecting the responses such as Yes/No and Likert scale categories. These data are then analyzed to identify customer trends or other items of interest to management. The data can be useful, but key to their usage is the application of suitable mathematical tools. Traditionally little more than standard statistics has been used in the analysis of ordinal, or category, data. This chapter introduces measures of agreement and dissent to the field of e-business analysis and shows how ordinal data can be analyzed in meaningful ways.