Design of Delphi technique integrated with the social media to make consensus based on experts’ opinion

Delphi technique is the structure communication process to collect and analyse the experts’ opinions with controlled feedback in an iterative manner to build consensus. Social media is an open and unstructured communication platform with flexibility to generate the contents at anytime from anywhere. Integration of the Delphi technique with social media provides an opportunity to utilize the social media users as experts and leverages the experts to participate in the Delphi communication process from anywhere and at anytime. The purpose of this research is to study the feasibility to integrate the Delphi technique with social media. To examine the feasibility of integrating the Delphi technique with social media, the design science research method is chosen as a research approach. From the literature review of the Delphi technique and social media, the design guidelines were identified to develop the prototype system and to conduct the experiment as a proof of concept. The university course feedback is selected as the context area to conduct the experiment with the prototype system. A pre survey is conducted to study the background information of technological knowledge of the participants and to know the opinions of the participants towards the context area. In the experiment, four questions were asked to the participants in each Delphi round to measure the group consensus and ideas convergence. The participants in the experiment were free to provide response to the questions from anywhere at any time using the Twitter account. The results show that the experiment has been successful and the experts are able to make consensus on their opinions. In addition, this study also shows that the Delphi technique can be integrated with social media to build consensus. The results also support that Twitter may not be the ideal social media platform for such experiment. In the future studies, the design issues should be carefully considered for getting the better results‏