Logical Decisions - Classweb

the idea that other manufactures and system alternatives could be
added later if necessary. All of the candidate computers were
IBM PC "Clones" with 80386 Intel CPUs, hard drives, two floppy
disk drives, and VGA color monitors and graphics cards.
After the decision maker had identified the preliminary
alternatives, the next step was to refine the overall goal of "choose
the best computer." The decision maker initially came up with
five sub-goals under the overall goal. These were:
! Minimize Price,
! Maximize Quality,
! Maximize Speed,
! Maximize Hard Drive Performance, and
! Maximize Video Quality.
The decision maker then refined these sub-goals until he could
quantify them. The price goal was straightforward and could be
quantified directly as a measure -- the total price of the system
(including any applicable taxes and shipping). Two of the goals --
Speed and Hard Drive Performance could be measured using
standard measures included in all of the ads. Speed was mainly a
function of the CPU clock speed and the presence and size of a
memory cache. The decision maker created measures to capture
these two considerations. Similarly, the decision maker could
characterize hard drive performance by the size of the drive (in
megabytes) and the disk access time (measured in ms). Video
performance was more difficult to measure, but could be divided
into qualitative measures related to the monitor and the video
card.
The most difficult goal to measure was the quality goal. After
some thought, the decision maker felt that quality should reflect
the reputation (if any) of the manufacturer, and favorable reviews
of the computer in national or local publications. In addition, the
decision maker included two other more specific concerns under
this goal -- the quality of the computer's keyboard and its FCC
certification type.
As the analysis progressed, the decision maker realized that he
was worried about buying a mail order computer because of
possible difficulties in obtaining service. A measure was added to
reflect this concern.
10-2 Section 10 -- Examples