Yohei Aoki, Chimaki Shimura, Hironori Washizaki, Takanobu Kobori, Yoshiaki Fukazawa, Katsutoshi Shintani, and Takuto Nonomura, “Horizontal Relation Identification Method to Handle Misalignment of Goals and Strategies Across Organizational Units,” IEEE Access, pp. 1-11, 2019. (to appear)(SCIE indexed)

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 goals and strategies are linked throughout an organization by iteratively determining lower-level goals and strategies. 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. 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.