Fresh Approaches to Benchmarking IT
Focusing on Customer Experience and IT Effectiveness
Poor experiences with IT benchmarking typically happen with those initiatives undertaken for defensive purposes - usually to prove that IT is "good enough," quiet the critics, or justify IT spending. The unstated ambition is often to be perceived as better than average, or perhaps no worse than the leading competitors.
Conversely, a fresh perspective for benchmarking IT begins by embarking with an offensive purpose. In other words, to view benchmarking as an opportunity to discover how to raise IT capability and performance to higher, even world-class, levels. This is not really a new purpose for benchmarking in general, but it is a fresh perspective for many organizations benchmarking IT.
There are three "flavors" of offensive IT benchmarking, and each supports different objectives and uses different work processes:
- Detailed Metric benchmarking is useful when trying to improve a production-type process like data center operations or call centers. Such processes tend to be fairly similar, rigorously defined, and somewhat standardized, which enables direct comparison with others who have similar, disciplined measurement programs.
- Summary Metric benchmarking is useful for trying to identify improvement opportunities in any area and for types of processes that are less uniform among comparators (like problem-solving or development processes). The consolidation of measures into summary metrics enables broad comparisons and "rationalizes" the process differences among comparators.
- Discovery benchmarking is useful when trying to find new, innovative, or alternative processes, practices, or ways of thinking in comparison to those currently followed. This makes discovery benchmarking particularly useful when the cost to improve a current process always seems to be greater than the value created by each incremental improvement (i.e., when the process is reaching the end of its improvement "S" curve).
Correctly approached, benchmarking is inherently a good, and potentially ambitious, idea. It can also be a back-door means of injecting management and measurement discipline. To get the most from comparison with others, you have to explore the "business system" behind process performance and understand not only process structure and performance levels, but also the subtle interplay among an organization's processes and its organizational structure, management systems, and values and beliefs. Perfect comparisons are rare.
This Re.sults report explores Detailed Metric, Summary Metric and Discovery benchmarking, and explains what it takes to avoid the pitfalls of benchmarking IT. It also provides a model by which you can gauge your company's level of benchmarking maturity.