Aligning Indicators with Goals

In this section, generic goals are presented in such a way as to facilitate their mapping with indicators.

Aligning indicators with the long-term goals of the organization is of primary importance. Indeed, the decomposition of strategic goals into operational measures align the local and operational improvement efforts with the organization’s success factors (e.g.: Kaplan and Norton, 1996, p. 13, Franceschini et al., 2019, p. 124).

Because goals are unique to every organization, standardized indicators couldn’t be mapped with organizations’ goals a priori (i.e. at design-time). It is the organization’s responsibility to adapt and align the standard indicators to their goals a posteriori (i.e. at implementation-time). Nevertheless, there are important goal commonalities between organizations and generic goals may be identified, documented and proposed as suggested mappings to organizations.

Organizations using such suggested mappings should be attentive to the fact that processes are dynamic and continuously evolving, which implies that the alignment and exhaustiveness of indicators must be periodically reviewed and corrected (Franceschini et al., 2019, p. 111).

Goals may be expressed in a multitude of ways. Goal entries are thus presented in this section with alternative wordings, even though every wording may convey a slightly different meaning.

Two data sources to identify generic organization goals:

• the literature,

• feedbacks from field practitioners.

Another objective of the identification of goals is to facilitate the verification that sets of indicators satisfy the requirement of exhaustiveness (cf.Exhaustiveness (Dictionary Entry)) and that they are balanced (cf. Balance (Dictionary Entry)).