On Friday, I went into our CEOs office to talk about blog post ideas. I knew that I wanted to write a post about IT Benchmarking, but I’d already covered the virtues of comparing your IT environment to others in another post and I didn’t want to sound like a broken record. After 30 minutes and a full white board this post was born.
All right, you’ve read the title and can probably surmise that I’m going to talk about IT Benchmarking here. You’re right. I am. But let’s take a step back.
You’re not a frog and I’m not a bunny rabbit. Let’s not jump ahead.
What Are The Key Assets In Any Organization?
When you boil it down to the simplest parts, every organization has three things it can’t function without
- Money
- People
- Data
And companies spend time and energy (not to mention money) trying to understand how these assets are performing in order to prioritize and to get the most out of what they’ve got. Makes sense, right? When you look at each one, you can see how businesses use comparison and benchmarking:
1. Money- Think of all the ways your own company analyzes financials. You look at things like spend, income, return, risk, expenses and compare your numbers to similar companies. Since there are so many standard measurements used by every company, comparing and benchmarking a company’s financial standing is pretty straightforward (you know, assuming you’re a legitimate, legal business)
2. People- They’re pretty important, and companies rely on them to exist. People are benchmarked and compared by looking at things like salary (are we paying too much?), skills, and development. With things like salary surveys, certifications, education, performance, and memberships to professional organizations, etc., people can be compared. The level of understanding for “people benchmarking” isn’t necessarily as straight forward and reliability as financial measurement, but you can get a pretty solid picture of how you’re doing.
3. Data- Um, Yeah. That’s a tough one.
Data is tough because, well, when you talk about data, what are you really talking about?
You can have two people in the same department speaking completely different languages when it comes to what data means to them. And that makes sense, because when you look at how IT benchmarking as been accomplished until now you looked at two things:
- Infrastructure- What kind of hardware do we have? How fast are the servers? How many devices do we support?
- Applications- What versions are we running? How many licenses do we have?
But what about the data itself?
You can’t compare when you have no one to compare with
I’m going to ask a couple of questions and I want you to think about them:
- Compared to similar companies in your industry and by size, do you think your average file age is
- older than average
- younger than average
- about the same
- Does your average user use more or less disk space than users in similar companies?
- How much is your data growing year over year? Is that more or less than the average?
- How much unwanted data (things like mp3s, etc) do you have compared to other companies?
- Compared to your competition, are you spending more per gig on storage? Less?
I’m not asking for the answers, instead I’m wondering how you would find the comparison data.
Until now, you’d probably have to shell out a bunch of cash to buy some kind of survey conducted by phone a year ago. How useful do you think that report is?
The answer: not very. But let’s give a hypothetical here. What if you were able to compare your entire data environment with others anonymously using live community statistics? Now that changes the game.
