  Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is extended to the evaluation of performance
of organizations within the framework of the implementation of plans for
improvements that set management goals. Managers usually set goals without
having any evidence that they will be achievable at the moment of conducting
performance evaluation or, on the contrary, they may set little too unambitious
goals. Using DEA for the benchmarking ensures an evaluation in terms of targets
that both are attainable and represent best practices. In addition, the
approach we propose adjusts the DEA benchmarking to the goals in order to
consider the policy of improvements that was pursued with the setting of such
goals. From the methodological point of view, the models that minimize the
distance to the DEA strong efficient frontier are extended to incorporate goal
information. Specifically, the models developed seek DEA targets that are as
close as possible to both actual performances and management goals. To
illustrate, we examine an example that is concerned with the evaluation of
performance of public Spanish universities.
