Benchmarking becoming obsolete?
Today I was asked to give my opinion on the proposition “when outsourcing is benchmarking required to prevent a failure” by an editor of an IT magazine. My first thought was: of course it is, as including a benchmark clause in a contract was standard practice when I drafted a contract. But then I thought again and come to a less back-and-white conclusion. Benchmarking before or during the contract period is common good and big business for companies like Gartner, Alsbridge and Compass, but given the increased complexity and tailoring of the solutions provided I wonder whether their usage is not restricted to a limited set of services. Services which soon get so common that many just buy them out of the cloud. Let me explain. Many organizations outsourcing for the first time did not know what to expect from a supplier and often also have no clue about the cost of a workspace or server. They just knew the total IT budget and had a target to reduce it by 5% before next year. The bench...
