What Are Objectives?

Objectives are the required or desired outcomes that form your corporate strategy. You can create an objective for:

An entire organization, for example, Oracle Corporation
A department, for example, Sales department

When you create an objective, you assign it one or more KPIs that are to be used to measure its progress and performance. For example, you can measure the progress and performance of an objective named Improved Customer Satisfaction by assigning it the following KPIs:

Average Customer Survey Satisfaction Score
Number of Customer Complaints KPIs

For more information on KPIs, see Chapter 11, "Using KPIs and KPI Watchlists."

Within a scorecard, you also create the initiatives that are required to meet the objectives. See "What Are Initiatives?" for additional information on initiatives.

Objectives that you create are displayed hierarchically in the "Strategy pane." The root objective represents the entity that you are scorecarding, that is the entire organization or a department. The KPIs that are assigned to assess the performance of objectives are displayed below the objectives in the Strategy pane.

The Strategy pane also shows the statuses of objectives and KPIs using the appropriate colors and icons that you specified for assessment mappings. See "Defining Assessment Mappings for Scorecards" for additional information on assessment mappings.

Best Practice:

When creating objectives, if possible, use subobjectives measured by KPIs to monitor results. Corrective action becomes incremental, reiterative, and more achievable. For example: the objective, Improve Financial Results, might include Increase Sales, Reduce Costs, Increase Employee Effectiveness, and Streamline Operations as subobjectives.

Use related documents to provide supporting information for the objective, initiative, and so on.

See "Creating Objectives" for additional information on creating objectives.