Open Standards Benchmarking® Turns 20!
If the rate of change outside is greater than the rate of change inside, organizations will quickly be surpassed by the competition. Benchmarking has long been a management tool used to accelerate the rate of change and support large-scale transformation —it’s also now being performed at a rapid, cost-effective pace.
To help organizations benchmark faster and with greater confidence, APQC and IBM joined together 20 years ago to create and launch the groundbreaking Open Standard Benchmarking Collaborative (OSB) designed to facilitate open access to tools and the data used in benchmarking.
Together they set out to provide reliable, unbiased and consistent access to process frameworks created by industry for industry to include process definitions, measures, and benchmarking data. Since establishing the OSB, hundreds of thousands of organizations from around the world have contributed and used the open standards repository including 20 process frameworks and over 4 million data points across over 4,000 commonly used performance measures.
Boundless Benchmarking: Revolutionizing Business Models With Open Standards
As part of the 20th anniversary of the Open Standards Benchmarking Collaborative, in early 2022, APQC and the IBM Institute for Business Value embarked upon research to understand the impact and importance of benchmarking on organizations’ ability to make important, informed decisions, drive revenue growth, and realize cost savings. In this report we look at how business leaders are prioritizing the use of open standards and benchmarking today and how it impacts business. But even more importantly, we preview the role of open standards and benchmarks in the ecosystem economy.
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In this presentation the IBM Institute for Business Value's Anthony Marshall, senior research director; Kirsten Crysel, associate partner; Jacob Dencik, economic research leader; and APQC’s CEO and President Lisa Higgins discuss the findings from the survey. During the presentation they explored the impact and value of benchmarking, extension of benchmarking with ecosystem partners, and the relationship between benchmarking and process mining.
Game Changer
Creating the Open Standard was a major milestone in APQC and IBM's history. It changed the game for organizations and professional services firms around the world. Today professional services firms rely on OSB data to compete, allowing them to focus on their methods and knowledge to assist clients in achieving goals, rather than expend their resources collecting data that could be viewed as biased.
How did an Open Standard shape the principles of performance management and benchmarking?
- Streamlined the ability to compare across processes by providing over 20 industry frameworks.
- Provided access to over 6,000 standardized measures, definitions, and formulas to assist organizations in focusing on the vital few measures to understand performance.
- Enabled consulting firm clients with a single source of reliable and unbiased data.
- Provided real-time access to benchmarks at no cost.
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