The purpose of the study is to evaluate and describe how three large companies with Swedish presence have coped with the investment appraisal ex-ante a purchase of a BI system. Further, the paper strives to investigate how the companies evaluated the perceived benefits, which are of intangible nature and hence difficult to quantify.

The topic of these Thesis is the use of the multi-criteria methods at budgeting the expenditure side of the state budget. The first chapter of the thesis describes in detail the ex ante analysis as a support tool for decisions on public expenditure and also the economy, efficiency and effectiveness as the criteria for the ex ante and ex post analysis of the public expenditure of the state budget. Furthermore, I describe here analysis of decision making, specifically the individual elements and the structure of decision-making process.The second chapter focuses on various methods of quantification of the weight of the criteria and the methods of multi-criterial decision. In the third, final chapter, I apply the methods described in second chapter to a specific example.