Corporate Goals

Businesses have their own requirements for software, and they are as high level as the personal goals of the individual. "To increase our profit" is pretty funda mental to the board of directors or the stockholders. The designer uses these goals to stay focused on the bigger issues and to avoid getting distracted by tasks or other false goals.

CORPORATE GOALS

Increase our profit

Increase our market share

Defeat our competition

Hire more people

Offer more products or services

Go public

Psychologists who study the workplace have a term, hygienic factors, which Saul Gellerman^[1] defines as "prerequisites for effective motivation but powerless to motivate by themselves." The lights in your office, for example, are hygienic factors. You don't go to work because the lights are nice, but if there were no lights at all, you wouldn't bother showing up.

^[1] Saul W. Gellerman, Motivation and Productivity; Amacom, New York, 1963, ISBN 0-8144-5084-9.

I have adapted this term as hygienic goals, which I define as goals prerequisite for effective functioning but powerless to motivate by themselves. All of the corporate and practical goals shown in the list are hygienic. From the corporation's point of view they are important goals, but the corporation isn't doing the work; people are, and their personal goals are dominant.

There is a close parallel between corporate and personal goals: Both are the highest expressions of goals for their respective owners. Neither can be slighted. Software that fails to achieve either one will fail.