Consensus ranking – An ICT security awareness case study

There are many disciplines where the problem of consensus ranking plays a vital role. Decision-makers are frequently asked to express their preferences for a group of objects, e.g. new projects, new products, candidates in an election, etc. The basic problem then becomes one of combining the individual rankings into a group choice or consensus ranking. The objective of this paper is to report on the application of two management science methodologies to the problem of identifying the most important areas to be included in an Information Communications Technology (ICT) security awareness program. The first methodology is based on the concept of minimizing the distance (disagreement) between individual rankings, while the second one employs a heuristic approach. A real-world case study from the mining industry is presented to illustrate the methods.