Towards a Core Model for Higher Education IT Management Benchmarking

Abstract

This study evaluates three European higher education IT benchmarking projects by applying a custom comparison framework that is based on benchmarking literature and IT manager experience. The participating projects are Bencheit (Finland), UCISA (The United Kingdom) and UNIVERSITIC (Spain). EDUCAUSE (The United States of America) is also included as a project outside our geographical focus area due to its size and prominence in North America. Each of these projects is examined to map the data indicators they use and to form a rough description of their benchmarking process. Major components are then discussed to aid in the development of a European-wide higher education IT benchmarking model.
We found that the most common data indicators are related to costs, infrastructure, and IT management structure. Notable differences are related to the emphasis of common indicators, such as cost and infrastructure, as well as non-common indicators such as organisational learning and best practices. These differences seem to stem at least partially from the different goals of the projects.
The benchmarking processes have less variance than the data indicators. Some projects have more ambitious goals regarding organisational learning than others, which also had an impact on the data indicators. The most common tool to collect data from higher education institutions was to use a web-based form. Data analysis was most often done manually with Excel and often verified in a consistent process. All projects have a yearly cycle, and a yearly report for the participating organisations’ managers was common.