Strategy-to-Task Assessments

We present a quantitative methodology for assessing how well an organization's budgetary resource plan aligns to its enterprise goals. We determine priority weights based on a hierarchical strategy-to-task analytic structure (Kent, 1989). For our example application in the United States Air Force, the hierarchy aggregates program elements to systems to mission areas to enterprise goals. The weighted sum of funding provides our measure of budget alignment to enterprise goals for any proposed budget. Given this measure, we select the budget that maximizes achievement of any single goal using a greedy algorithm and any list of prioritized enterprise goals using preemptive goal programming. We examine tradeoffs between enterprise goals by altering funding levels in a given budget for program elements that affect one of the goals. We conduct additional sensitivity analysis by altering our goal priorities and evaluating how the reordered goals affect the optimal solution and illuminate the budget decision trade space.