ABSTRACT

Benchmarking the Applications Development and Maintenance and Support (AD/M) environment can potentially provide significant insights into the performance of IT processes and identify how and where they can be most effectively improved. However, many organizations initiate a benchmarking activity without first fully determining the objective of the benchmark or the benefits they hope to achieve, or establishing the criteria by which projects and applications will be selected and compared. This chapter explores the reasons why organizations choose to benchmark, identifies the potential benefits of benchmarking, and highlights the pitfalls of failing to appropriately plan the benchmarking activity or introduce rigor into the benchmarking process to ensure its success.