Data-Driven Causalities for Strategy Maps

The Strategy Map is a strategic tool that allows companies to formulate, control and communicate their strategy and positively impact their performance. Created in 2000, the methodologies applied to develop Strategy Maps have evolved over the past two decades but always rely solely on human input. In practice, Strategy Map causalities - the core elements of this tool - are identified by managers’ opinion and judgment which may result with a lack of accuracy, completeness and longitudinal perspective. Even though authors in the literature have highlighted these issues in the past, few recommendations have been made as to how to address them. In this paper, we present a preliminary work on the use of business operational data and data mining techniques to systematize the detection of causalities in Strategy Maps. We describe a framework we plan to develop using time series techniques and Granger causality tests in order to increase the efficiency of such strategic tool. We demonstrate the feasibility and relevance of this methodology using data from skeyes, the Belgian air traffic control company.