Identifying Misalignment of Goal and Strategies Across Organizational Units by Interpretive Structural Modeling

To achieve the business objectives of an organization, the business goals and strategies must align. GQM+Strategies® is a method that aligns goals and strategies. By repeatedly defining lower-level goals and strategies, GQM+Strategies creates grids, which are specified from the initial set of goals and strategies, to link goals and strategies across different level units. Although the above approach can maintain consistency within a vertical refinement tree, horizontal relations at different branches may be missed. Herein we propose the Horizontal Relation Identification Method (HoRIM) to identify horizontal relations. HoRIM is an approach that detects the difference between the initial GQM+Strategies grid and a model obtained by applying Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) to the grid. ISM provides a hierarchical structure from the relation matrix that presents the relations between elements. An experiment confirms that HoRIM identifies about 1.5 times more horizontal relations than an ad hoc review. Additionally, an industrial application demonstrates the practical value of HoRIM.