{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,12]],"date-time":"2026-05-12T16:09:44Z","timestamp":1778602184200,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":41,"publisher":"SAGE Publications","issue":"6","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2017,5,23]],"date-time":"2017-05-23T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1495497600000},"content-version":"tdm","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/page\/policies\/text-and-data-mining-license"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["journals.sagepub.com"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Journal of Intelligent &amp; Fuzzy Systems"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2017,5,23]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>In current global business, outsourcing of information technology (IT) has become a growing approach. In this respect, selecting a service activity of IT outsourcing as well as IT outsourcing projects could be designed based on multi-criteria decision-making frameworks. This study proposes a new decision-making approach based on group decision analysis under interval-valued hesitant fuzzy (IVHF)-environment to rank the IT outsourcing services\u2019 activities. The IVHFSs could assist the decision makers by assigning some interval-values membership degrees for an IT outsourcing services\u2019 activities among the conflict criteria under a set to margin of errors. For this purpose, the preferences and opinions of decision makers are expressed by linguistic terms, which are converted to interval-valued hesitant fuzzy elements. In the proposed approach, the weights of criteria and decision makers are computed based on interval-valued hesitant fuzzy preference evaluation method and interval-valued hesitant fuzzy utility degree method, respectively. Consequently, the criteria and decision makers\u2019 weights are provided in the procedure of proposed evaluating and ranking approach to decrease the errors. In addition, the decision makers\u2019 judgments are aggregated in the last step of the proposed approach to avoid the loss of data. Finally, the proposed interval-valued hesitant fuzzy approach is implemented to a real case study to indicate the applicability of the presented approach. In addition, a comparative analysis is provided to discuss the obtained results.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3233\/jifs-152520","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2017,5,26]],"date-time":"2017-05-26T14:41:50Z","timestamp":1495809710000},"page":"4081-4093","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/sage-journals-update-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":11,"title":["Selection of IT outsourcing services\u2019 activities considering services cost and\u00a0risks\u00a0by designing an interval-valued hesitant fuzzy-decision approach"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"32","author":[{"given":"S.","family":"Ebrahimnejad","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Industrial Engineering, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"M.A.","family":"Naeini","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Engineering, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"H.","family":"Gitinavard","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Young Researchers and Elite Club, South Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"S.M.","family":"Mousavi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Shahed University, Tehran, Iran"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"179","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2017,5,23]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_2_2_2","first-page":"97","article-title":"Strategic sourcing for services: Assessing the balance between outsourcing and insourcing","author":"Clemons E.K.","year":"1997","unstructured":"ClemonsE.K. and HittL.M., Strategic sourcing for services: Assessing the balance between outsourcing and insourcing, Operations and Information Management Working Paper (1997), 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