Business objectives, strategic objectives and operational objectives

Here is a comment I left on immeria.net for post http://blog.immeria.net/2010/12/web-analytics-business-education-at.html.

I followed this class with Stephane about a year ago. Good stuff! Looking at this outline again, I find it to be very customer centric which is obviously what every (online) business should be. However, one of the problem I always struggle with is defining proper operational objectives. It's one thing to associate a strategic objective to a specific persona and to define KPIs that will measure the outcome(s) to be achieved, but what about operational objectives? How can we link general operational objectives to specific personas? Is it a good thing to have general impersonal operational objectives or should web managers only consider operations if they support strategic objectives?

The way I see it, there are 3 levels of objectives. 1) General business objectives. 2) Strategic objectives. 3) Operational objectives. In a perfect world, operational objectives should support strategic objectives that should allow general business objectives to be achieved.

Let's say, for example, that a business objective is to improve by 15% the the profit from the Web channel within 6 months from now.

Once I have defined this general objective, I can digg into qualitative and quantitative data in order to understand what's the best strategy for it to be achieved. Maybe I will end up with a strategic objective like : by summer 2011, keyword xyz will be in the top 3 results of Google which will generate 10% more sales for this product/service, and so on. Good.

Now, what about defining an operational objective which will support implicitely this strategic objective? For example: by summer 2011, my main domain authority will have increased by 5 % which will ???...

Here is where I always get confused. I'm sure it's not a bad thing to increase my main domain authority or even my specific product/service page authority in order to help me achieve my strategic goal. But how can I link one to another? Do I have to link them both?

I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

Best,

kinaze