TBI has found that the benchmarking of services is most productive when:
- It is specifically targeted to questions about which a service organization needs additional information
- We as consultants fully understand the organizational structure and service delivery issues facing the service provider
Unlike benchmarking companies that utilize structured questionnaires to gather common information from a large volume of firms, TBI tailors benchmarking investigations to specific client needs and typically undertakes a benchmarking study only to answer specific questions, most often as part of a larger project effort.
For example, we use benchmarking to help organizations to determine if outsourcing services or renegotiating existing service contracts would be likely to yield cost savings. We also employ benchmarking to help organizations to establish performance improvement objectives, giving them an outside view of industry capability to consider along with information about their own performance levels.
TBI Benchmarking Databases and Approach
For each benchmarking that TBI undertakes, our consultants work with clients to frame the benchmarking analysis carefully so that their expectations and the results of the analysis are coordinated. TBI has benchmarking databases based on its consulting experience with IT organizations for all IT functions: helpdesk, desktop support, application development and maintenance, mainframe data center, server operations, voice telecommunications and network management. Our work with other shared service areas (e.g., in Finance & Accounting and Human Resources) has also provided data on service levels and cost that can be used to conduct competitive benchmarking analyses.
TBI’s consulting experience has taught us that benchmarking to simply get an annual report card, without consideration of organizational goals and differences, is not particularly valuable. We have also observed that the least valuable type of benchmarking data for our clients tends to be that which is commonly available from all organizations and reported in terms of industry averages from companies that do a volume benchmarking business. Instead, TBI has found that the relatively more messy data that we collect from our consulting work with clients, has greater richness in terms of potential information value for our customers because we have the in-depth understanding of it to help our clients interpret it and use it to advantage. TBI maintains databases of information about service offerings, internal and external costs of service, service level objectives, and levels of performance achieved.
Custom Benchmarking Studies
Where data are not already available and our clients require customized benchmarking, TBI assists them in structuring data collection, identifying comparison groups, and will provide customized benchmarking data analysis and reports.
