Horizontal Relation Identification Method to Handle Misalignment of Goals and Strategies Across Organizational Units

GQM+Strategies aligns business goals and strategies to help organizations achieve business objectives. Using the initial set of goals and strategies, GQM+Strategies creates a grid, through which the goals and strategies are linked throughout an organization by iteratively determining the lower-level goals and strategies. The GQM+Strategies creates consistency within a vertical refinement tree but cannot handle horizontal relationships from different branches. Hence, horizontal relationships lead to problems, such as redundant investments, inefficient resource utilization, and failure. Horizontal relation identification method (HoRIM) is proposed to handle horizontal relationships. The HoRIM is a grid modification approach that identifies differences between the initial GQM+Strategies grid and a model by interpretive structural modeling (ISM). Herein, we experimentally demonstrate that HoRIM finds about 1.5 times more horizontal relationships than an ad hoc review. Additionally, we show its practicality via a case study involving a real-world application.