Benchmarking

Benchmarking

Q: Benchmarking is a relatively simple concept, however, some organizations have found it more rewarding than others?

Introduction

Benchmarking is a technique of governance designed to improve the quality and efficiency of public services. In essence, benchmarking involves comparing specific aspects of treating a public problem with an ideal form of public action (the benchmark), then acting to make the two converge. By making comparisons in this way, public administration is supposed to improve through processes of learning and emulation.

The focus can also be a particular process, such as billing or information technology. This method is common in business and industry, and it has seen growing acceptance in the public sector, where it is most associated with the identification of best practices. Often, benchmarking is a collaboration among like organizations that attempts both to identify important indicators of success and to provide data to the collaborating organizations about performance.

One example of benchmarking is the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The Baldrige award is administered by the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology and is awarded by the president of the United States to businesses, education, and health-care organizations that are judged to be outstanding in seven areas: leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, information and analysis, human resource focus, process management, and business results.

Ongoing efforts to understand how management practices can contribute positively to organizational performance have resulted in little more than an array of prescriptions about what constitutes “best practice,” as defined by Camp in 1989, often adopted by organizations blindly and uncritically. The xenomania (opposite of xenophobia) that reflects the popularization of some practices neglects issues of transfer across context that has been much in evidence in management research, not least in the way good Japanese practices do not transfer in the U.S. context. More recently the focus has been shifting on the analysis of “promising practices,” revealing the challenges in identifying, adopting, and adapting practices that may deliver improved organizational performance, noted Delbridge and his colleagues in 2006. Unlike “best” practices that are contextually specific, promising practices provide scope for wider adaptability to local conditions. The reason that promising practices transfer better is because they are founded on the principle of transience and adaptability rather than on benchmarking and imitating.

Promising therefore are the practices that emerge out of the possible connections that can be fostered within a practice and across practices. Promising practices would have the dynamic capability identified by Zollo and Winter in 2002 to renew themselves as part of their ongoing, proactive, and dynamic process of reconfiguration. The practising attempts that are central to promising practices enables them to maintain their natural fluidity as they take account of and respond to the multitude of endogenous and exogenous forces. In other words, promising practices are those practices that enable organizations to change their routines and to proactively reconfigure their existing practices. Promising practices are dynamic practices, they reveal that practising keeps the organization in tension. This point would suggest also that one of the ...