Decision-making model for the effective e-services adoption in the Indian educational organizations

Abstract

Due to the advances in wireless network environments, consumers/end-user behaviors continue to expand in cyberspace. Similarly, university students (i.e. universities’ consumers) can easily shift from one university to another. In recent years, decision-makers in educational organizations have faced multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems in e-service adoption in order to improve quality standards and maintain students’ retention in highly competitive education environments. Generally, many required criteria in MCDM cannot be evaluated accurately since accurate data cannot be obtained from the decision makers’ assessments. Thus, this research aims to propose a decision-making model for identifying the factors that highly impact on e-service adoption in educational organizations. This new model combined the fuzzy Decision MAking Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (fuzzy DEMATEL) and fuzzy Techniques for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (fuzzy TOPSIS) to weight the interactions among the factors which were defined from a comprehensive review of literature and to determine the relative importance of these factors. The findings from our new proposed model: fuzzy DEMATEL-TOPSIS showed that environmental factors are the most important for effective e-service adoption among educational organizations in India. The proposed decision making model could guide educational organizations to improve their decisions related to technology adoption in their organizations. The conclusions and practical insights gleaned from this research could also hopefully be useful to school authorities in assisting with the adoption, acceptance, and usage of e-services.