Using the Internet to Streamline a Multicriteria Sustainability Analysis Process

Sustainability, like most engineering problems, requires us to choose between tradeoffs. This task is made more difficult because the stakeholders involved often have different value systems and are affected differently by different impacts and choices. Several multicriteria decision support systems have been proposed and used for major decisions. All of these systems require significant time from an expert in the methodology and each of the stakeholder representatives. This resource demand often makes the analysis prohibitive with respect to the cost of the decision.
In a recent study using the multicriteria system Sustainability Return on Investment, stakeholder representatives met with a facilitator for three one-hour webmeetings. The representatives also had an opportunity to interface online via a social networking type of interface. The interface was directly linked to the calculation tool, so all the calculations were transparent to all representatives. As a result, the resources and cost required dropped dramatically.