Almost every indicator system promises “total alignment”: every indicator connected to strategy, every team knowing what it answers for. And almost every one implements it the same way: fields on a form. One field for the strategic objective, another for the initiative, another for the process.
Anyone who has inherited one of those systems knows the consequence: alignment can be read, but not queried. Nobody can ask the repository “which indicators are orphaned if I retire this objective?”, because the answer lives in text. It degrades unnoticed — the objective was renamed, the field went stale. And it cannot carry attributes of its own: what weight does this indicator have within the objective? What specific target did this unit deploy it with? A field has nowhere to keep that.
The alternative: every alignment is a relationship
In the Dexon BPM methodology, a measurement element’s alignment is not typed in: it is declared as a queryable relationship, and several of those relationships carry attributes a field could never hold.
| Relationship of the measurement element | Attributes carried by the relationship |
|---|---|
| Strategic objective | Weight of the element within the objective |
| Initiative | Weight |
| Portfolio of plans, programmes and projects | Target and weight per portfolio element |
| Organizational unit (deployment) | Weight |
| Strategic theme and axis | — |
| Capability | — |
| Risk | — |
The last two deserve comment, because they answer questions a field-based system cannot even ask.
The relationship with a capability answers this one: when several processes miss their targets at once, do they share a weak capability? A system that aligns indicators only with objectives and processes reads three related failures as three independent problems. One that also aligns them with capabilities reads them as what they are: a single capability gap with three symptoms.
The relationship with a risk turns the measurement element into a KRI — a key risk indicator. That one gets its own article, because it contradicts the common practice of keeping “KPIs” and “KRIs” as two separate catalogues.
The classification nobody types
Treating alignment as relationships has a consequence that simplifies design: the indicator’s classification — strategic, process, service, data, capability — is derived from what it measures and what it relates to. It is not written.
A classification field filled in by hand is an opportunity to contradict the structure: the indicator says “strategic” but is linked to no objective. A derived classification cannot contradict the structure, because it does not exist apart from it.
The boards: who answers, and in which role
Vertical alignment — everyone knowing which indicator they answer for and with what target — materialises in boards: rows assigning a measurement element to whoever answers for it, per fiscal year, with a role, a target and a weight of their own.
The alignment role distinguishes three forms of responsibility that practice tends to blur:
- Management — leads and coordinates the resources towards the result.
- Success — directly produces the result.
- Influence — contributes indirectly, through other areas.
Without that distinction, accountability becomes an argument about who is to blame. With it, it becomes a conversation about what belongs to whom.
And one precision that prevents the most common deployment mistake: the board’s target may differ from the institutional target — and it must be able to. That is precisely what deploying a goal means: the organization commits to 95%; the unit carrying the historical backlog is assigned 90% this year. Per-period targets descend from the board, not from the indicator.
What changes in practice
With alignment as relationships, three questions that used to require a meeting become queries against the repository:
- What breaks if I retire this? The impact of deactivating an indicator includes its boards: who is left without a target.
- Can this objective actually be verified? An active objective with no linked indicators is a hypothesis with no instrument.
- Where is the real gap? Failures that share a capability group themselves.
Total alignment is not a brochure adjective: it is a structural property of the repository, which is why it can be verified. The full treatment is in chapter 15 of the Dexon BPM V8 methodology, and running strategy on these objects is described in Strategy execution.