Making a Sustainability Business Case for Alternative Building Designs Using the LEED Requirements

Making an evaluation and selection of alternative building designs is a critical issue facing many organizations. The selection of greener building designs is an important aspect of this process. Making the wrong choice can prove to be very costly as organizations try to uncover a design's potential for success from an economic and sustainable perspective. Recently, the issue of green construction and building design has grown in interest. However, the topic of sustainable building design selection remains an area of lesser investigation that has not seen much progress in the field of sustainable building design. The purpose of this article is to help organizations more effectively select and evaluate the relative sustainability of building designs using a multi-criteria decision model, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) that has been applied to many areas of managerial decision making. More specifically, we structure a decision hierarchy for alternative sustainable building design selection based on the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System(tm) requirements and making a business case for selection of a specific design. We provide an illustrative application that can be implemented as part of a larger research and design decision support system.We will now present some background on the discussion of organizational decision making and making business cases.