When presented with these issues, the GIS project recipients indicated
that this additional statistical evaluation was unnecessary for their purposes;
they were simply happy to have a short and defensible list of priorities for
GIS implementation based on a statewide sample of user needs. As a result,
the eight items were analyzed as the final priority list (from a functional and
practical, rather than statistical, perspective) for additional analysis. In accordance
with established QFD methods (Akao, 1990; Sullivan, 1986), four GIS
technology experts examined this list of eight issues (user “whats”) against
current technology capabilities (provider “hows”) to determine relative costs
and effectiveness for implementing different levels of the GIS services and
applications described by the top eight user needs.