Potential GQM+strategies improvement using balanced scorecard perspectives

Business-information technology (IT) alignment, which links IT-based strategies to higher business goals, is becoming more critical as organizations rely more on IT solutions to conduct their business activities. While GQM+Strategies provides a platform to achieve good business-IT alignment, lack of attention to different aspects of an organization may lead to failure to do so. In this paper, we evaluated three cases of GQM+Strategies implementation to find possibilities of integrating balanced scorecard perspectives into the GQM+Strategies framework by classifying the goals and strategies into balanced scorecard perspectives and evaluating them based on rules of the balanced scorecard framework. We found that GQM+Strategies has a problem in maintaining balanced distribution of goals and strategies across different perspectives. We also saw signs that inexperienced grid developers may align the goals and strategies poorly when classifying the goals and strategies into perspectives. Lastly, we found that transitions between different balanced scorecard perspectives happen exclusively at the derivation of goals from strategies. Based on those findings, we propose three potential methods to improve GQM+Strategies in order to detect potential problems. On top of that, we explain what is needed for each method before we finally utilize them.