Identifying and prioritizing risks in information and communication technology infrastructure projects in a neutrosophic environment

The current economic growth model relies heavily on establishing ICT infrastructure. Nevertheless, previous research has shown that a significant number of these projects exceed their budgets. Infrastructure investment requires thorough risk identification, management, and strategies for mitigating these projects' potential challenges. The risk management process begins with identifying potential risks. The next step is risk analysis, which involves filtering and prioritizing the identified risks. In most cases, it is not feasible for managers to manage all identified risks due to budget and time constraints, limited human capacity, uncontrollable risks, unpredictability of events, etc. Therefore, the main issue after identifying risks is their prioritization. Since prioritizing risks requires considering various indicators, experts widely agree upon using multi-criteria decision-making. Accordingly, in this study, AHP and TOPSIS are employed to weigh the indicators and prioritize the risks. On the other hand, another challenging issue that must be addressed in expert-based approaches is the uncertainty inherent in expert judgments. In this study, all expert judgments are collected in the form of neutrosophic sets. After a comprehensive literature review to identify potential ICT-IP risk factors, identified risks were evaluated by experts, leading to the selection of critical risk factors. Effectiveness, event frequency, manageability, consequences, and discoverability criteria were selected based on the literature review and expert recommendations, and their weights were determined through neutrosophic pairwise comparisons. The neutrosophic decision matrix was formed based on the experts' opinions to rank the risks. Next, the crisp decision matrix was constructed using the score function. Finally, applying the TOPSIS method, the risks were ranked. The results show that the technological risk is the top priority, and the organizational risk is the least critical. This ranking can help decision-makers allocate resources and prioritize mitigating the most significant risks first.

کلیدواژه ها:

ICT ، Infrastructure projects ، Neutrosophic Sets ، Risk Prioritization