Multi-criteria decision-making leveraged by text analytics and interviews with strategists

Strategic decision-making in organisations is a complex process affected by preferences, experiences, perspectives, and knowledge, which, in most cases, are ambiguous, contradictory, and represented in unstructured data. This paper develops a methodological framework to address strategic decision-making processes from a multi-criteria perspective, assisted by text analytics and interviews. The framework comprises five stages and 12 steps, and is empirically tested in a decision scenario involving a strategic focus for future analytics initiatives in order to stimulate value generation from analytics. The proposed framework enables the discovery, validation, and prioritisation of strategic patterns from relevant interview data. Among six decision alternatives discovered in the validation scenario, customer analytics was the strategic focus most relevant to future analytics initiatives. This article contributes to understanding and addressing complex decision-making processes and mixed research in organisations, through a multi-criteria perspective leveraged by a text-driven computational approach.