A prActicAl guide Benchmarking in european Higher education

A STEP BY STEP APPROACH
Choosing the right benchmarking approach for your
purpose
At the level of individual institutions, increasingly a shift occurs from close
cooperation to increasing competition, and therefore more reluctance in the
sector to share some types of information due to the obvious concern that
sensitive data may be misused. This was evident in the beginning of the
project as desk research only produced formal information of 18 collaborative
benchmarking groups on university management. However, many more
higher education institutions are engaging in various types of one-to-one
benchmarking approaches. In the project we were fully aware that much
more benchmarking is taking place in the higher education sector, which is
not advertised to a larger audience. We advocate that both one-to-one and
collaborative approaches have their value in carrying out systematic and
comparative data gathering and the further steps in benchmarking. In both
cases issues of trust, confidentiality and information sharing must be dealt
with in a careful manner. More on this can be found in the section ‘Conducting
a benchmarking exercise’.
At its simplest, one-to-one benchmarking can be initiated through active
institutional and desk research within the institution looking at public data
available on one or several other institutions as a comparative exercise to
produce reports for improvement.
In one-to-one non-collaborative approaches, both higher education institutions
enter their data in a database which already contains data from other
higher education institutions, or those external data are contributed by the
professional association/consulting company which coordinates the benchmarking
exercise. Once the data have been entered, higher education institutions
receive a report of their scores and information on where they are
positioned against the competition. They then have the option to obtain
expert advice from the database owner which will help them progress and
achieve higher levels of performance.
58 A Practical Guide - Benchmarking in European Higher Education