FreePint Feedback - A Few Thoughts about Benchmarking
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

Robin Neidorf comments on FreePint consulting projects around benchmarking and explains how FreePint hopes you will participate in future projects.

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At least a few times each month, a customer will submit a contact form or reach out to me directly with "Benchmarking?" somewhere in the subject line.

In recent years, we've conducted benchmarking on contract values, content purchasing, seat licensing and distribution, size of information staff and adoption of mobile technology.

You'd think it would be relatively easy to count things, and then compare what you've counted across different organisations.

It's not easy at all.

What Do You Count?

One of the first questions we have to ask when considering a benchmarking project is what's in scope. Some examples from our projects:

• Product implementations: are all variations of a product included, only full and global implementations? What about partial implementations in one region and full implementations in other regions? Does "reader" access count, or only full user access?

• Staff size: do we look at information professionals embedded in departments, or only those working in an information centre? 

• Staff ratios: should we calculate ratios based solely on fee earners in the same country, or all the fee earners the information professionals occasionally support in other countries?

• Expenditures: when considering "cost per seat", do we include unused seats or only those in use at the time of data collection? Do we include costs billed back to business units or not?

Answering these questions adequately with a single customer is tricky. Getting half a dozen or more customers to answer them in the same way is mind-bending.

Who Counts?

For any benchmarking project to be meaningful, we need critical mass of participation. This means garnering support of organisations similar in size, industry and information management approaches so that the data will make sense when anonymised and combined.

Securing the time and attention of information managers long enough to gather their data is incredibly challenging. Even when they want to participate, they run up against the reality of how much time they have in a given week.

Often, the information manager wants to participate, but other challenges arise, most commonly:

• Internal politics, reorganisations, or competing priorities
• Confidentiality clauses in service contracts
• Involvement of another department is required, such as legal or procurement, which is not eager to participate.

Whilst we'll do basic benchmarking on any subject with a minimum of six participants, even that minimum proves difficult to secure.

How Can We Help?

We believe that benchmarking can be useful, and the number of queries we get on the subject suggests that you would benefit from having this data.

How can we overcome the challenges? Have you participated in benchmarking projects that have worked well and been useful to you?

And, perhaps most importantly, can you commit the time to help us design viable projects and submit data so that we can all benefit?

Please share your thoughts, either personally to me at robin.neidorf@freepint.com, or via our online Contact form.

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