Evaluating e-commerce projects using an information fusion methodology

E-commerce is changing the business landscape, but applications carry investment risks. E-commerce applications redefine business models ranging from retailing to trading stocks to originating mortgages. Organizations will be making significant investments in e-commerce applications that may or may not realize their potential payoff. In this paper we propose a methodology to evaluate investments in e-commerce applications. We frame investment issues in the e-commerce environment and present qualitative models to augment quantitative investment analysis. We introduce the power average as an aggregation operator for information fusion in group decision-making in e-commerce project selection. We outline a collaborative methodology to arrive at a group consensus involving individual qualitative assessments. We present a scoring model for individual applications, and a portfolio model for groups of applications.