Goals and areas¶
You open a city-builder game and the tutorial says: "build something". You place a road, a few houses, a shop. Two hours later the traffic is a mess and the money has run out. What was missing was not more buildings. It was a goal.
Companies have the same problem. A company that "goes digital" without knowing why buys tools that nobody uses. So every transformation plan starts in the same place: where does the company want to be in two or three years? In March 2025, Meliá, the hotel group with its head office in Palma, published its 2024 results and said that Melia.com and its other own sales channels already brought in 50% of its centralised sales. That sentence is not about technology. It is about strategy, and everything digital Meliá does has to serve it.
What you will learn
- Tell a strategic goal from a tool, and write goals that can be measured
- Find a company's goals in its public sources and cite them
- Measure where a company starts with a real digital maturity self-assessment
- Map the production, business and communication areas and align each one with a goal
- Rank the areas with a priority matrix, and avoid the trap of digitalising whatever looks most old-fashioned
Goals, not tools¶
A strategic goal says where the company wants to be, by when, and how you will know it got there.
In the city-builder, "build a metro" is not a goal. "Halve the commuting time to the city centre within five years" is. The metro is one way to get there; buses might be another.
The same test works for companies. The most widespread checklist is SMART, first published by George T. Doran in 1981: a goal should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
| Badly written | Why it fails | Well written |
|---|---|---|
| "Reduce waste." | Not measurable, no deadline | Cut rejected or unsold product from 6% to 4% of production in 18 months |
| "Install a B2B ordering portal." | It is a tool, not a goal | Receive 70% of hotel orders online within 12 months |
| "Be more sustainable." | Too vague to check | Cut oven energy per kilo of product by 10% in 2 years |
The right-hand column belongs to the example company of this unit: a fictitious industrial bakery in Marratxí with 80 people, which bakes bread and pastries for hotels and supermarkets. It has an office (IT) and a bakery floor with ovens, cold rooms and a packing line (OT).
Careful: \"our goal is to implement a CRM\"
It is the most common mistake in this unit. A CRM, an ERP or an AI model are tools. If your "goal" names a product, ask "and what for?" until the answer is something the company's management would put in a report.
Where real goals are written¶
You are not inside the company, so you cannot ask the management. You can read what the company publishes about itself.
| Source | Where to find it | Who publishes it |
|---|---|---|
| Annual report or sustainability report | "Investors", "Shareholders" or "Sustainability" on the corporate website | Large companies; listed ones also file them with the CNMV |
| Results press release | "Press room" or "News" | Large companies, every quarter or year |
| News in the local or business press | Última Hora, Diario de Mallorca, Ara Balears, Expansión, Cinco Días | Any company that makes news |
| "About us" or "Our strategy" pages | Corporate website | Almost every company |
| Job offers | LinkedIn, InfoJobs, the company's careers page | A company hiring a "data analyst" is telling you something |
Two rules from the course project apply here with full force:
- Every fact about the company carries its source: title, author or outlet, date and a working link.
- What you cannot find is written as a hypothesis, and labelled as such.
Where does the company start?¶
Before deciding what to digitalise, you need to know how digital the company already is.
Digital maturity is how far a company already uses digital technology in its strategy, its processes and its people.
The European Union has a free tool for this: the Open DMAT (Digital Maturity Assessment tool) of the European Digital Innovation Hubs network. It works in the browser, in Spanish and the other EU languages, and it scores a company in six dimensions:
| Dimension | The question behind it |
|---|---|
| Digital business strategy | Does the company have a plan for digital, and money for it? |
| Digital readiness | Which technologies does it already use? |
| Human-centric digitalisation | Are the staff trained and involved? |
| Data governance | Are the data managed and protected? |
| Automation and artificial intelligence | Are machines and software doing repetitive work? |
| Green digitalisation | Does digital help the company use less energy and material? |
In the city-builder, this is the info view that colours each neighbourhood from red to green before you start renovating.
You are not the company
The test is designed for the company's own managers. You answer it with what you learned in D1 to D5, and every answer you had to guess is a hypothesis. Write in the dossier which ones they were.
Areas, aligned with goals¶
An area is a part of the company that does one kind of work: the bakery floor, purchasing, sales, administration. Communication areas are the channels that connect people inside and outside the company: website, phone, messaging, email, and the network underneath.
Aligning means writing, for each area, which goal it serves. In the example bakery:
| Area | Type | Serves goal |
|---|---|---|
| Hotel orders (phone and WhatsApp today) | Business + communication | Online orders |
| Ovens | Production (OT) | Energy |
| Quality and food safety (paper temperature logs) | Production (OT) | Waste |
| Administration (ERP already in place) | Business (IT) | Online orders |
| Website and messaging with customers | Communication | Online orders |
The priority matrix¶
You cannot renovate every neighbourhood at once. Two questions decide the order: how much does this area move a goal? and how digital is it already?
A priority matrix scores each area on two axes and multiplies them, so the areas with high impact and low maturity come first.
Score impact from 1 (low) to 3 (high), and maturity from 1 (low) to 3 (high). Then: priority = impact × (4 − maturity).
| Area | Impact | Maturity | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hotel orders | 3 | 1 | 9 |
| Ovens | 3 | 1 | 9 |
| Quality | 2 | 1 | 6 |
| Administration | 2 | 3 | 2 |
Orders and ovens go first. Administration already has an ERP: it is not a bad area, it just has less to gain.
Careful: \"digitalise whatever looks most old-fashioned\"
A paper notebook that nobody depends on is not a priority, however analogue it looks. An area climbs the matrix only if it moves a goal. That is why goals come first.
In class: goals, maturity and matrix¶
You work on your own company, partly alone and partly with your group.
| Step | Do this | You should see |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · alone | Find one strategic source of your company that no one else in your group has used (annual report, results release, news, job offer) | A document with a date and a working link |
| 2 · alone | Copy one sentence or one figure that says where the company wants to go, and turn it into a SMART goal | A goal you could check in a year |
| 3 · group | The Technician opens the Open DMAT, chooses Spanish, and the group answers together with D1–D5 open | A result per dimension; a screenshot or PDF of it |
| 4 · group | In your shared spreadsheet, one row per area (at least four production or business areas and one communication area): goal, impact, maturity, priority formula | Two or three areas at the top |
| 5 · group | Decide who signs each section of D6 and the roles, and write it in the group log | The group log for D6 |
Hand in on Classroom (individual class activity): your source card (source, sentence or figure, SMART goal, source or hypothesis), with your group's Open DMAT result and matrix attached. Generative AI is not allowed in this activity.
For your project¶
This lesson builds section 1 · Strategy and areas of D6 · Transformation plan (criteria a, b and c). The areas come from the departments you described in D1; the goals and the matrix are new.
Key takeaways¶
- A strategic goal says where the company wants to be and by when; a tool is only a way to get there. Use SMART to check it.
- Real goals are in the company's public sources: annual and sustainability reports, results releases, press, job offers. Cite them; label the rest as hypothesis.
- Digital maturity is how digital the company already is. The EU's Open DMAT scores it in six dimensions.
- Map the production, business and communication areas, and align each one with a goal.
- A priority matrix (impact × room to improve) decides which areas go first. Old-fashioned is not the same as important.
Quick check¶
1. Which of these is a well-written strategic goal?
- Implement a CRM in the sales department
- Become a more digital company
- Receive 70% of hotel orders online within 12 months
- Improve customer service
Only the third one is SMART: specific, measurable (70%), relevant and time-bound (12 months). A CRM is a tool, and the other two cannot be checked.
2. Your company does not publish an annual report. Where can you still find signs of its strategy?
- Nowhere: without an annual report you must invent the goals
- Press news, the "about us" page and its job offers
- By phoning the company and asking for internal documents
- In the Open DMAT results of other companies
Small companies rarely publish reports, but they appear in the press, describe themselves on their website and reveal plans in their job offers. The course project uses only public information; whatever you deduce is a hypothesis.
3. What does a digital maturity self-assessment such as the Open DMAT measure?
- How fast the company's internet connection is
- How much the company spends on computers
- How far the company already uses digital technology, dimension by dimension
- Whether the company complies with the RGPD
Digital maturity covers strategy, technology in use, people, data, automation and green digitalisation. The result tells you where the company starts, which is what the matrix needs.
4. In the priority matrix, which area goes first?
- Low impact on the goals, high maturity
- High impact on the goals, low maturity
- The area with the most employees
- The area with the oldest computers
Priority = impact × (4 − maturity). An area that moves a goal a lot and is barely digital has the most to gain.
5. Which of these is a communication area?
- The bakery ovens
- The warehouse
- The phone and messaging channels the hotels use to place orders
- The accounting software
Communication areas are the channels between people, inside and outside the company, and the network that carries them. The ovens and the warehouse are production; accounting is business.
6. A classmate wants to put \"digitalise the paper visitors' book at reception\" at the top of the matrix because it is the most old-fashioned thing in the company. What is the best answer?
- Agree: the more analogue an area is, the higher its priority
- First check which goal it serves; if it serves none, it is not a priority
- Agree, as long as the Open DMAT says the company is not mature
- Remove it: paper areas can never be digitalised
An area climbs the matrix only if it has impact on a goal. Low maturity alone is not enough. Goals first, then areas.
7. You answer the Open DMAT for a real hotel chain and guess how many staff have had digital training. What must you do in the dossier?
- Nothing: the test result is official once submitted
- Leave that question blank in the dossier and say nothing
- Say which answers were guesses and label them as hypotheses
- Ask an AI to estimate the real figure
You are not the company, so some answers are hypotheses. The project rule is to say so. And generative AI is not allowed in assessed work.
You know where the company wants to go and which areas go first. Next, check whether those areas fit with the rest, and choose their technologies: Fit and technologies.