Re:Talk about internal benefits first (Score 1)

I managed an Enterprise Data Center environment with much the same questions. We hired a major vendor to survey our operation and provide benchmark information against other organizations of the same size or similar industry. The survey pointed to areas where we were superior in performance, performed work at lower cost, and where our performance/cost were below industry standards. There are a number of organizations which can offer the same type of service. If you are truly looking to benchmark costs and performance the only true way to achieve this is to employ one of these agencies in order to get access to detailed, often proprietary, comparison information the agencies have from their customers. One word of caution - the vendor I worked with had a specific view of "IT Services" a view which was in some aspects not aligned with our organizational structure. Conforming to the vendors approach would have engaged multiple practices within the vendor organization, greatly increasing costs. In the end we worked to create a customized solution which helped save on costs, while compromising on some of the survey results. Understanding exactly what areas of IT Services - Help Desk, Desktop Support, Server Support, Network Support, Development, etc. you want to measure is crucial to successfully engaging a vendor in benchmarking your organization. A less costly source of information might be the CIO Working COuncil. The CIO Working Council is an organization which publishes member Best Practices for IT initiatives. I've often found their guidance to be more helpful than that from major consulting vendors whose guidance is more strategic and forward looking rather than immediately applicable.