A prActicAl guide Benchmarking in european Higher education

Fourth, benchmarking is not a fad, but a strategy for improvement. It assists
managers in identifying practices that can be adapted to build plans that are
realistic and acceptable to higher education communities, and in this way
achieve higher performance goals.
Another misconception about benchmarking is that it is only a process of
measuring best performance (APQC, 1999, www.apqc.org). It is sometimes
wrongly believed that after discovering the best-performance benchmark,
the organisation should turn to its own creative resources to meet or beat the
benchmark in whichever way it can think of. Benchmarking is not just a comparative
analysis of how an institution matches up to the others in terms of
different performance measures, since such a comparison does not by itself
bring change (CHEMS 1998). The most important aspect of benchmarking is
learning from others and innovative adaptation of good practices that help
achieve best performance. It is best practice even more than best performance
for which benchmarking strives, even if it may start by finding best performance.
It is also not a ‘process re-engineering,’ where internal processes are investigated
and redesigned without reference to another organisation’s practice.
Benchmarking is also not just a survey, where data are presented in aggregated
or averaged terms.
In this respect, the benchmarking literature often employs the concepts of
‘true’ and ‘false’ benchmarking. It may be overly normative to judge what is
true or false - words can be used in any way one likes. However, this distinction
may be helpful to show where we stand.
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