DOI: https://doi.org/10.62204/2336-498X-2025-1-10

Methodological principles of forming a system

for assessing the effectiveness of achieving strategic goals

in the digital economy

Iryna Ignatieva,

National University of «Kyiv-Mohyla Academy», Kyiv, Ukraine,

iignatyva@ukr.net; ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9404-2556

Annotation. The initial prerequisite for any meaningful activity is goals. Only their presence and clear awareness allow to organize the actions of an individual or an organization, direct them to achieve a certain result, encourage improvement, self-development, learning, and determine the search for the best ways and means of activity. The goal-setting process is of particular importance today in the context of forming motivational mechanisms for development and establishing effective management principles for modern business entities in the context of digitalization of business and society. Quite often, it is economic indicators that are a prerequisite for the formation of the general goals of business entities and serve as indicators of the effectiveness of achieving goals. The basis of this approach is the well-known concepts of classical economists, in particular, A. Marshall in his fundamental work “Principles of Economic Science” notes that the progress of economic theory is due to the fact that “money serves as a fairly tolerable measure of the driving force of most of the motives that shape the way of life of a person” [1]. This economic approach has been used for quite a long time in management science, as the determining measure of the success of managers was measured through financial results. It is the achievement of a certain financial result, certain financial parameters that was an indicator of the success and efficiency of the business entity. However, in the context of modern organizations in the VUCA, SPOD, DEST and BANI World, there is a need to solve a scientific problem – to find tools that would allow assessing the effectiveness of management at different levels of management and monitoring intermediate results with the possibility of making corrective actions at different stages of implementation of strategic goals.  Therefore, the main objective of the study and the article is to highlight the experience of using a tool for assessing management effectiveness based on the priority of strategic goals. The study was based on the use of: the method of comparison, generalization – to clarify and formalize the essence of the concept, graphoanalytical method – to provide clarity of the material and schematic representation of a number of theoretical and practical provisions of the study.

Keywords: management system, enterprise, changes, goal setting, potential, digital economy, strategy.

Introduction. The complexity of the current external environment creates the impression that it is unnecessary to focus on goals, and therefore to formulate and set them. This approach gives us a myopic view of the dangers and opportunities emanating from the external environment. The process of formulating and setting goals for enterprises is complex but necessary. Formal goal setting creates advantages for all businesses, large, medium and small, whether they are just starting out or have an established business. Goals force the management of enterprises to think about the future from the standpoint of an objective assessment of their capabilities. Therefore, the article is devoted to solving methodological problems of evaluating the effectiveness of goal setting and using the tool in the process of assessing the effectiveness of managers’ activities in achieving the strategic goals of an economic entity.

Results and their analysis. A study of the methodological principles and practices used by various business entities in formulating their business goals, in particular, in determining the strategic development framework, has made it possible to identify that one of the problems in forming a block of strategic goals is the prioritization of goals. The need to solve this problem is traditionally associated with the limited investment resources available to business entities and the inability to implement all strategic programs. Thus, there is a problem of choosing strategic areas of activity, which cannot be solved without focusing on the target block in general and on the prioritization of goals in particular.

The problem of prioritizing goals remains, but it can be viewed from a different perspective.  Since the task of forming a target block is central to system analysis, regardless of the field of application, it is interesting to learn from the experience of solving it in other industries and interpret the results obtained in relation to production systems.

At first glance, prioritization of any objects (economic, technical, social, etc.) seems to be a rather simple task with more technical difficulties.  But nowadays, technical difficulties in the digitalization of business entities’ processes have been practically overcome, which cannot be said about methodological support.  When solving practical problems, they are either ignored or incorrectly bypassed.  In this regard, this issue requires more detailed consideration. First of all, let us formulate these methodological problems:

1. Can the established prioritization of goals be unified for different business entities?
2. Is it possible to unify the established priority of goals for one entity for a long period?
3. Will the priority for goals that have a strategic orientation remain the same for operational planning purposes?

4    If the priority of strategic planning goals is not transferred to the goals of operational planning, how should they relate to each other?

The conducted research on the specifics of the analysis of industrial enterprises and the peculiarities of forming strategies of the regions of Ukraine made it possible to develop and propose methodological principles for establishing the priority of the enterprise’s goals in order to further use the results of the assessment in the analysis of the system’s performance as a whole. In order to be able to apply the prioritization of goals in further analysis, the term priority is used with a slightly different interpretation. In this case, the priority will reflect not the contribution to the achievement of the global goal, but the priority of the local goal. This task does not require measurement on the scale of relations, which is associated with rather serious methodological difficulties, but allows to limit oneself to the rank scale. This procedure for prioritizing goals is not formalized and requires the use of expert opinion.  There are many techniques for obtaining an expert assessment using an ordinal scale, but the most organic in relation to the expert is the method of pairwise comparisons [2,3]. When using the method of pairwise comparisons, the expert must compare all the goals in pairs in terms of the order of their implementation and for each pair make a judgment about the advantages of one goal on the specified basis, or their equivalence.  The symbols <,>,= may be used.  At the next stage, the results of the expert’s judgment should be processed and the goals should be ranked. The results can be processed by building a “preference graph” or in tabular form using the coefficients aij.

When processing the results of the examination in tabular form – based on the primary expert information in the form of pairwise comparisons and the above indicators aij, a square matrix is built and calculated by rows of the matrix, which allows you to build a ranked series. Higher priority goals have a higher value. After establishing the priority of the goals, the expert group divides them into goals of the first, second and third order. It is recommended that the beginning of the ranked series be attributed to the first-order goals, the end of the series to the third-order goals, and the middle to the second-order goals. The main task of experts is to determine the boundaries of the beginning and end of each group. The results of this work will be needed when moving from strategic benchmarks to tactical objectives. The next stage of assessing the achievability of the company’s goals based on the study of the priority of goals is based on the use of the geometric summation method. The essence of the method is as follows: for the selected group of indicators, a graph is drawn in the form of a square (Fig.1), each side of which is a measuring scale for fixing the value of a particular indicator for a certain period of time.  For the practical construction of the graph, the ratio of the criterion to be evaluated to the indicator is quite important. For example, there are indicators in the company’s activities that have a ratio of the higher the value, the better (labor productivity), and on the other hand, there are indicators “the lower the better” (unit costs per unit of production). This must be taken into account when orienting the measurement scales in the chart. In each period of time when the efficiency of the system’s goal setting is measured, its total score is a point on the graph that moves when the values of at least one indicator change. In order to organize the movement of the point and provide the possibility of analysis, one of the corners of the graph is selected and fixed, in relation to which the movement of the point will be regarded as an increase in the efficiency of goal setting and system functioning (in Fig. 1, this corner has a “+” sign).

Fixing the angle on the graph allows you to correctly orient the measurement scales for specific indicators.  The indicators can be assigned to the sides of the square in any way. This method has a number of advantages, but in terms of practical use of the method, there are a number of problems that need to be addressed.  First of all, it is the problem of the number of indicators. The methodology of the methodical approach involves the use of four indicators. What if there are fewer or more? If the number of indicators decreases, it is suggested to duplicate indicators on opposite sides of the square. For example, if there are 3 indicators, then it is possible to consider the opposite sides 1-2 and 1-3; if there are two indicators, it is possible to duplicate two indicators 1-2, 1-2.  If there are much more indicators, it is suggested to divide them into groups and build a corresponding graph for each group separately. In this case, the field of each graph is divided into several evaluation zones.  There is no limit to the number of such zones (for example, 5 zones in Figure 1).  In order to aggregate the indicators, another summary graph is built, the sides of which are measurement scales for groups of indicators. Groups of indicators are randomly assigned to the sides of the graph. Each side is divided into evaluation zones.  The performance score obtained on the respective group graph is transferred to the linear scale of the summary graph, focusing on its position relative to the boundaries of the evaluation zones on the group graph. Then, geometric summation is performed by finding the point of intersection of the lines on the summarizing graph.

The next problem that requires further analysis is the use and comparison of the priority of goals to determine the company’s strategies. As it was established earlier, the priority of the goals of the strategic plan may differ from the priority of the goals of the current moment. Moreover, this difference may concern only the first-order goals. For example, unforeseen, sharp changes in the requirements of the external environment require the priority implementation of several second- and third-order goals. As a result of the procedure for restructuring the company’s goals, these goals will be added to the first-order group. Moreover, in this group, they will be the highest priority, since they require priority implementation.  The very structure of goals and their prioritization is a guide to action for the formation of the strategic set of the enterprise. At the time of forming the strategic set, all strategic guidelines can be divided into groups depending on their belonging to a particular goal of the enterprise. Subsequently, in accordance with the distribution of strategic guidelines by objectives, they, like the objectives, can be classified as first-, second-, and third-order.

Conclusions. Testing the proposed methodological tool allows us to draw the following conclusions. Since the methodological recommendations are based on the capabilities of the square, it is rational to group goals into groups of four indicators. But this is not always possible if there are many goals. In this case, there will be much more iterations and more attention should be paid to prioritizing strategic goals. When prioritizing, it is important to realize the level of goal achievement and to avoid formalizing this process. Because the priority will affect the overall performance analysis. Thus, the goals of the 1st level of priority, which is often not the case in practice, are achieved at the level of 30-40%, while simpler tasks of operational activities have an indicator of 70-80%. In general, such results for a business entity will have an average level of performance. But will this solve the strategic objectives and will the implementation of the entity’s strategy be effective? Of course, it is the goals of the first level of priority that are important for the owners and key stakeholders.  Another situation that arises is when there are fewer than four groups of indicators. Then you need to decide on one side of the square. The practice of applying the methodological recommendations proves that it is logical to use indicators of the 1st priority level goals on opposite sides of the square. After all, this group of goals is the most important. Therefore, its double use will allow to increase the level of influence on the resulting indicator.

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