Benchmarking TBM
Benchmarking as a Core TBM Outcome
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Benchmarking is one of the six core outcomes of the TBM Framework — alongside transparency, strategic alignment, optimization, maturity, and value realization. Each outcome answers a different leadership question, but benchmarking provides the vital context for them all: How do we compare? Are we competitive? Where do we lead, and where do we lag?
For readers new to the discipline, What is TBM? explains how TBM enables organizations to manage technology like a business and deliver measurable value. Within that framework, benchmarking is the capability that transforms raw data into performance insight, helping leaders interpret cost, efficiency, and value through a comparative lens.
When practiced through the TBM Outcomes, benchmarking is more than a retrospective check against industry averages. It is a forward-looking capability that equips CIOs, CFOs, and business leaders with defensible insights for investment planning, sourcing decisions, and value conversations with stakeholders.
Benchmarking is most powerful when it is embedded through TBM By Design. Rather than adding comparisons after reports are built, benchmarking is designed into the TBM model itself. By structuring TBM Taxonomy cost pools, resource towers, and solutions with comparability in mind, organizations create a living model that is always “benchmark-ready.” Whether the focus is cloud unit costs, IT labor efficiency, or service delivery benchmarks, a By Design approach ensures the data model supports meaningful, repeatable insights.
The TBM Maturity Assessment illustrates how benchmarking extends beyond costs. Organizations can measure their TBM practice maturity against peers, giving leaders a roadmap for where to strengthen capabilities and what outcomes to expect next.
Benchmarking is most effective when built into TBM from the very beginning. TBM By Design explains how to design benchmarking into your taxonomy, cost models, and decision loops so it becomes a continuous, embedded capability.
In today’s environment, where boards and executives demand evidence of technology’s contribution, benchmarking is no longer optional. It is a designed outcome of TBM that shifts conversations from cost containment to competitive performance — linking every technology dollar to measurable business value.
What is Benchmarking?
At its core, benchmarking is the practice of comparing costs, efficiency, and performance to identify opportunities for improvement. Within a Technology Business Management (TBM) discipline, benchmarking provides the evidence leaders need to understand whether their technology portfolio is competitive, productive, and aligned to business goals.
Effective benchmarking depends on data quality and structure. Without sufficient volume, accuracy, and consistency, comparisons risk being misleading. The TBM Taxonomy ensures that cost pools, towers, and solutions are defined in a common language, making comparisons “apples-to-apples” across business units, industries, or external peer groups. This is where TBM By Design principles matter: when cost models are structured for comparability from the outset, benchmarking becomes an inherent capability, not a bolt-on activity.
Organizations can execute benchmarking in several ways:
- Do-it-yourself (DIY): Many begin with internal TBM data — for example, comparing the cost per end-user seat across geographies, or service desk efficiency across business units. Internal benchmarking provides fast insights and is a low-bar, high-impact entry point, especially when built on a well-structured TBM model.
- Commercial tools and services: TBM platform providers increasingly offer embedded benchmarking dashboards that map customer data against anonymized peer groups. These tools are often delivered by our ecosystem of TBM providers, enabling organizations to quickly assess competitiveness without building custom peer groups.
- External benchmarking sources: The TBM Council is extending access to peer data through partnerships, most notably with The Tech Economists, a research group with more than 25 years of IT benchmarking across 2,000+ companies and 20 industries. This collaboration introduces new economic measures — like Technology Inflation and Technology Intensity — that go beyond cost comparisons to evaluate real productivity and competitiveness.
No matter the method, benchmarking is most powerful when designed into your TBM practice from the beginning. By embedding requirements for comparability into the way you model cost pools, allocate towers, and attribute solutions, you create a living TBM model that is always ready for benchmarking. This is the essence of TBM By Design whitepaper — making benchmarking not an afterthought, but a capability woven into every stage of technology decision-making.
Benchmarking in the TBM Context
Benchmarking within TBM is enabled by the structured layers of the TBM Model. By organizing costs, resources, and solutions in a consistent way, the model ensures that comparisons are “apples-to-apples” across business units, providers, or even industries. A cost pool for public cloud, for example, is defined and allocated the same way across the model, allowing leaders to see not only whether spend is higher or lower than peers but whether it is being consumed effectively.
This consistency extends beyond cost. Benchmarking with TBM allows organizations to evaluate performance and efficiency ratios — such as cost per user for collaboration tools, servers per admin, or mailboxes per FTE — because the model ties cost to consumption and outcomes. In this way, TBM benchmarking supports a shift from simple financial comparisons to conversations about efficiency, productivity, and business value.
Quality of data is critical. Benchmarking only works when the underlying financial, operational, and consumption data is complete, reliable, and consistently structured. The Data for TBM site page outlines the types of data required and why taxonomy alignment is essential for turning cost transparency into actionable benchmarking insights.
By integrating structured modeling, a broader focus than just cost, and trusted data, TBM transforms benchmarking from a one-off exercise into a continuous capability — one that informs decisions at every level of the organization.
Types of Benchmarking
Benchmarking in TBM can be understood through two complementary lenses: scope and metrics. These perspectives are not arbitrary — they reflect the two dimensions leaders need in order to interpret benchmarks effectively. Scope answers the question “Who or what are we comparing?” while metrics answer “How are we measuring performance?” While other categorizations exist (such as by function or delivery model), the scope-and-metric lenses are the most practical and widely adopted in TBM because they align with how the TBM model organizes data and how leaders consume insights.
- Scope-based benchmarking considers what is being compared:
- Internal – benchmarking within the organization is often the fastest entry point. Comparing across departments, business units, or geographies can expose anomalies, uncover efficiencies, and highlight best practices that might otherwise stay hidden.
- Industry – aligning costs and performance to peer organizations in the same sector often relies on Taxonomy Extensions, which support industry-specific comparisons at the cost pool and tower levels.
- Solutions/Consumer-level – focusing on the cost and efficiency of a specific service, such as end-user computing or identity management, depends on the Solutions layer of the TBM Taxonomy, where services are modeled for consistent, “apples-to-apples” comparison.
- Custom – organizations with unique operating models often define their own peer groups or benchmarks. Custom benchmarking is most valuable when it leverages taxonomy-aligned categories to ensure results are consistent and credible.
- Metric-based benchmarking shifts the focus to how performance is measured:
- Cost – unit costs for infrastructure, SaaS, labor, or services are fundamental and tie directly to the TBM Outcomes, where cost transparency is a core capability.
- Efficiency – productivity ratios such as servers per admin or tickets resolved per FTE align to the Organization Value Drivers, where efficiency is recognized as a critical driver of business performance.
- Value – benchmarks that connect technology spend to outcomes, such as IT cost as a percentage of revenue or the unit economics of digital services, also tie into the Organization Value Drivers, which links technology investment to growth, innovation, and competitiveness.
- Maturity – benchmarking the TBM practice itself, not just the costs it manages, is reflected in the Maturity page and the TBM Maturity Assessment, helping organizations measure their progress against peers.
Together, these perspectives ensure that benchmarking supports both operational insights and strategic conversations. Scope defines the where of comparison, while metrics define the what, giving leaders a multi-dimensional view of their technology performance.
The High Impact TBM Use Cases whitepaper highlights benchmarking as a use case that evolves with TBM maturity. It shows how organizations can begin with foundational cost comparisons and progress toward advanced benchmarking that connects technology to business value.
By combining scope-based and metric-based approaches — and embedding custom benchmarking into the TBM model by design — organizations can move beyond narrow cost comparisons to a more holistic view of competitiveness, productivity, and value.
Data for TBM Benchmarking
The foundation of any benchmarking effort is data — not just having it, but ensuring it is structured, consistent, and trustworthy. In TBM, the most immediate and valuable source is internal TBM data. Organizations can begin by comparing service desk costs across business units, evaluating cloud spend by tower, or assessing end-user service costs across geographies. Because this data is already modeled within the TBM framework, it provides a ready starting point for benchmarking that highlights internal anomalies, best practices, and optimization opportunities.
External benchmarking options expand the view beyond the walls of the organization:
- The TBM Council’s partnership with The Tech Economists introduces two new economic measures — Technology Inflation and Technology Intensity. These frameworks help organizations evaluate whether their technology spend is keeping pace with macroeconomic conditions and whether it is delivering productivity and competitiveness relative to peers.
- Commercial TBM platforms increasingly provide embedded benchmarking dashboards, mapping customer data against anonymized peer groups to surface cost and efficiency insights.
- Advisory and subscription-based benchmarking services provide deeper comparative analysis, often with customized peer groups or tailored maturity diagnostics.
TBM By Design principles apply here as well. Treating benchmarking data requirements as part of building your TBM practice ensures the model is always comparison-ready — embedding peer data fields where needed, standardizing cost pools for consistency, and ensuring tagging and allocations are mature enough to support defensible insights.
For directional insights into industry adoption and priorities, the State of TBM Report provides survey-based data across hundreds of organizations worldwide. While not a benchmarking dataset, it can be used to frame peer trends and validate areas of focus as part of a broader benchmarking strategy.
Building a Benchmarking Practice
Benchmarking is not just a technical discipline — it is also a cultural one. By design, benchmarking introduces transparency and comparability that can create resistance if not handled thoughtfully. For this reason, both benchmarking and Change Management must be embedded into a TBM practice from the very beginning. The process of building a benchmarking capability is as much about preparing people for transparency as it is about preparing data for comparability.
The following steps illustrate how to build a benchmarking practice that is both structured and sustainable:
- Plan for benchmarking from the outset – Guided by TBM By Design, benchmarking should be part of the TBM model’s initial design requirements. Cost pools, towers, and solutions must be structured to support comparability, and data sources selected with benchmarking use cases in mind. Setting expectations early that benchmarking will be part of “how we manage technology” ensures transparency is accepted as a norm rather than resisted as a surprise.
- Establish internal baselines – Many organizations begin with internal TBM data, comparing costs and performance across business units, geographies, or services. Examples include service desk efficiency, cloud spend by tower, or end-user service delivery. Early baselines deliver quick insights and build momentum, especially when framed as opportunities for improvement rather than fault-finding. The TBM First Steps Guide provides practical advice for achieving these early wins and aligning IT and Finance on a shared foundation.
- Standardize taxonomy alignment – Consistent structures are essential for benchmarking to be fair and defensible. Aligning costs, towers, and solutions ensures that results are trusted and repeatable. This is where Change Management plays a crucial role, helping stakeholders agree on definitions and categories that may challenge entrenched practices but are necessary for true comparability.
- Select peer groups – Comparisons only gain credibility if peers are relevant. Industry, size, labor mix, and geographic footprint all shape the validity of benchmarks. Inclusion and transparency in this process are vital to build trust in the results. The Adoption page provides strategies for aligning peer selection with organizational priorities and maturity.
- Choose your benchmarking method – Organizations may rely on DIY comparisons, platform-based dashboards, or Council services. Each method has advantages depending on maturity and goals. The Use Cases page showcases how different benchmarking approaches apply in practice, from cloud cost validation to vendor contract analysis.
- Expand and mature – Over time, benchmarking should extend beyond internal and cost-based measures to include external datasets, maturity comparisons, and value/outcome measures. The Maturity page and TBM Maturity Assessment provide structured ways to assess progress, while reinforcing that benchmarking evolves with overall TBM maturity.
Building a benchmarking practice requires balancing technical design and cultural readiness. Organizations that plan for benchmarking from the outset, ground it in internal baselines, and integrate change management into every stage will create a capability that grows from quick wins into a sustained driver of competitiveness and value.
Mastering Technology Business Management Adoption: Roles & Responsibilities defines the ownership, governance, and change management responsibilities needed to embed benchmarking and other TBM capabilities into your organization’s operating model.
The Future of TBM Benchmarking: A Growing Ecosystem of Partners & Services
As TBM practices mature, benchmarking is becoming one of the most in-demand capabilities for technology finance and strategy leaders. What was once reserved for top-tier enterprises is now rapidly democratizing, thanks to a growing ecosystem of Council services, ecosystem partners, and commercial TBM platforms. These players are expanding access to datasets, diagnostics, modeling services, and subscription-based tools that make benchmarking scalable and repeatable — even for organizations just beginning their TBM journey.
Importantly, benchmarking is not one-size-fits-all. The ecosystem now spans everything from high-level external comparisons to internal benchmarks across business units or product teams. Many of these services are designed to align directly with Taxonomy 5.0, enabling benchmarking at specific modeling layers such as Cost Pools, Tech Resource Towers, and Solutions, and even against Organization Value Drivers like financial performance, risk & compliance, or innovation.
This ecosystem will continue to grow in three key ways:
- More benchmarks, more often – expanding catalogs to cover hybrid cloud, AI, SaaS, compliance, ESG, and even software engineering productivity.
- Embedded benchmarking – native dashboards within commercial TBM platforms that align with customer data models, delivering insights in real time.
- Subscription and advisory models – annual benchmarking services, tailored advisory support, and ongoing maturity assessments that embed benchmarking into operations.
The result is a future in which benchmarking is a routine capability embedded in TBM — continually testing the competitiveness, productivity, and value contribution of the technology portfolio.
The TBM Council and a Partnership with the Technology Economists
TBM is at its best when it’s rooted in real-world economics—measuring, modeling, and managing the full value of technology in the enterprise. That’s why the TBM Council is building an alliance with The Technology Economists, a research and advisory group founded by Dr. Howard Rubin that has spent over 25 years benchmarking global IT and technology investment patterns across more than 2,000 companies and 20 industries. This partnership reflects a growing shift: executives no longer want to measure just cost, but performance—relative to competitors, peers, industry baselines, and historical norms.
The Technology Economists bring two powerful concepts to this partnership: Technology Inflation and Technology Intensity. These frameworks go beyond traditional finance metrics to provide leaders with a way to benchmark the true economic impact of their technology portfolios. They support TBM’s evolving mission to serve as a value management discipline—one that links technology decisions with business outcomes like growth, margin expansion, productivity, and competitiveness.
Understanding Technology Inflation
Technology Inflation is a measurement of cost escalation across core tech domains including labor, software, hardware, cloud, and SaaS. It captures what most leaders already feel intuitively—technology budgets may rise in absolute terms, but inflation can quietly erode value. For example, in 2024, financial services firms saw IT spending rise by 4%, but inflation across the technology stack outpaced that at 4.8%, resulting in a net loss in purchasing power .
Why it matters:
- Technology budgets can grow without buying more value.
- AI, cloud, and transformation initiatives may underperform if inflation is not modeled.
- IT Finance and TBM leaders must factor inflation into both historical trend analysis and forward-looking planning.
By explicitly modeling Technology Inflation, TBM leaders can connect budget narratives to macroeconomic context—strengthening forecasting, board engagement, and defensible investment cases.
Measuring and Managing Technology Intensity
Technology Intensity is the ratio of IT spend to either revenue or operating expense, plotted on a conceptual triangle to show its proportionality. It is not just a metric—it’s a diagnostic tool to understand whether your technology investments are performing efficiently, compared to both peers and your own past. TBM already models the composition of spend (via Taxonomy 5.0 and connected standards); technology intensity adds a new layer: is the spend productive?
Dr. Rubin’s research shows that technology intensity correlates strongly with margin, growth, and innovation capacity. Using a parabolic performance frontier model, organizations fall into one of nine zones—ranging from underinvested to overinvested, with varying degrees of return on technology. The lesson: higher spend is not inherently better—what matters is alignment, yield, and strategic balance.
Ultimately, benchmarking is becoming a living capability. As organizations mature, benchmarks will be updated more frequently, contextualized with richer data, and expanded into new domains. This ensures that benchmarking remains essential to continuous optimization, competitiveness, and business value realization.
Call to Action
Benchmarking is not a side benefit of TBM — it is a designed outcome that transforms technology conversations from cost debates to value-driven strategies. To continue your journey:
- Assess your maturity – start with the TBM Maturity Assessment to understand where your organization stands today and identify opportunities to strengthen benchmarking and other TBM capabilities.
- Explore advanced benchmarking – learn more about the Council’s partnership with the Tech Economists, introducing new measures of Technology Inflation and Technology Intensity that expand benchmarking beyond cost.
- Design benchmarking in – TBM By Design shows how to embed benchmarking requirements into your TBM model from the very beginning.
- Deepen your foundation – build on this with the TBM Framework , TBM Taxonomy, and TBM Model, which explain how the structural elements of TBM make benchmarking possible.
- Advance adoption – the Adoption page provides strategies for aligning benchmarking with your organization’s maturity journey, while the Roles page clarifies ownership across CIO, CFO, and TBM Office responsibilities.
- Engage with the community – join a TBM Strategy Community to connect with peers who are applying benchmarking in cloud, agile, and FinOps contexts, and gain insights into practical use cases.
- Invest in skills – explore TBM Training and Certification to build practitioner capabilities that make benchmarking repeatable and trusted.
- Stay current – check the Upcoming Events for Council meetings, webinars, and forums focused on benchmarking and related TBM outcomes.
- Expand your perspective – read Intelligent Cloud Adoption, which explains how cloud strategy, cost optimization, and benchmarking come together to drive sustainable cloud value.
With these resources, you can design a benchmarking capability that matures alongside your TBM practice, ensuring technology is always measured, compared, and communicated in terms of the value it delivers.
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