Comparing your costs, performance or practices against peers or a reference standard. Genuinely useful for locating yourself in a market; routinely misused as a substitute for understanding it.
A benchmark answers the question "what do others spend?". The decision in front of you usually turns on a different question: "what do others get for it?", and that is the number the quartile chart never shows.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
Operators who have run the functions being benchmarked can tell you what the numbers conceal, before the cut or the contract is approved.
Get independent perspectivesBenchmarking compares an organisation's metrics, cost per unit, IT spend as a share of revenue, process cycle times, service levels, against a peer group or reference dataset, usually to locate performance in quartiles. It can also compare practices rather than numbers, examining how better performers achieve their results.
A benchmark can tell you that your cost base is an outlier and that a question is worth asking. It cannot tell you the answer, because the number arrives stripped of the scope decisions that produced it. "Top-quartile IT cost" depends entirely on what was counted as IT, what was outsourced and therefore hidden in other lines, what service levels were being bought, and whether the comparators were investing or harvesting. Two companies with identical benchmark positions can be in opposite strategic situations. When a benchmark is presented as the case for a cut or an award, the decision-ready question is always: same scope, same service, same ambition, or just the same denominator?