A prActicAl guide Benchmarking in european Higher education

HISTORY OF BENCHMARKING
Benchmarking is special
What is special about benchmarking compared with the quality assurance
streams mentioned above? The account above of the limited usefulness of
quality assurance models was giving in fact a relatively optimistic view about
their actual rate of adoption: “It should be self-evident ... that any method
adopted from the business sector is most likely to fail in defensive organisations
like the universities. Surprisingly enough, this seems not be true with
benchmarking” (Karjalainen 2002).
First, in benchmarking the focus is on the process of inter-organisational
learning. It requires, just like quality assurance, an aim to improve performance
of the institution. Also, it requires methods to know about the current
state of the institution, i.e. some form of evaluation or measurement. Yet
benchmarking sees the measurement as a tool to know where improvements
are needed, not as an end in itself, and gives more attention to the processes
of learning about ways towards achieving improvement than most quality
assurance methods do. Admittedly, BPR also gives attention to improving the
institution’s processes, but rather from the radical ‘blank slate’ point of view
while in benchmarking the question is rather: how can we learn from others
how to get to where they are from here, where we are-it is incremental
rather than revolutionary. Establishing or measuring externally visible performance
(through Key Performance Indicators or ‘KPIs’) is only the beginning
of benchmarking; the real issue of a benchmarking process is how to
achieve high performance, which needs information of a much more detailed
type than KPIs can give, from deep within the organisation. The aim is to find
out about good practice 5 rather than (only) good performance. 6
5
We prefer the more general term ‘good practice’ over ‘best practice’. ‘Best’ assumes that there is a single best
way to do things, while ‘good’ leaves room for different ways that may be effective in different circumstances or
for different organisations.
6
Although one would like to see a correlation between good practice and good performance, there may be cases
where good performance does not result from good practices (who never got through an exam with only studying
it the night before?), or where good practice does not lead to good performance (e.g. when other processes
in the organisation are not equally good, or when the environment is adverse).
30 A Practical Guide - Benchmarking in European Higher Education