By Martin Creaner, President, TM Forum
Benchmarking is one of those terms that everyone has heard of, most people know is important, but very few have actually seen in action.
While you might think of computer processors or servers being pitted against each other in head-to-head tests when the term benchmarking is mentioned, it really can be applied to so many different fields and industries.
Communications is not different, and even if we’re not as concerned about whether Processor A is running faster than Processor B, we do care a great deal about how we stack up against the competition in other ways.
When it comes to service providers, whether fixed-line, mobile or broadband, it’s really hard to gauge how you’re doing in terms of business or network performance since you’re really operating in a vacuum.
You may think things are great, but if your competition is just a bit further ahead of you, it could cost customers, which in today’s economy are the most important assets you have.
Gauging the Communications Industry
This is why four years ago TM Forum created its Business Benchmarking program. When we first set up the program, we thought it’d be a huge hit immediately, but what we hadn’t quite realized at the time is that in the communications industry, success breeds success. Essentially, once something becomes successful, you have a runaway hit, but it’s a struggle to get to that important point.
In our first year of operating the Business Benchmarking program, we had probably 10 or 15 service providers putting in their data, and with each new provider we had to go through a complete explanation of the concept of benchmarking, who else was doing it, and what we were trying to achieve. That’s not bad – a lot of research companies make a good living from benchmarking at this scale, but with more than 200 service provider members, we were committed to growing a much more significant benchmarking program.
The communications industry is notorious for following the leader, but by the same token nobody wants to be too much of a leader and be too far out there. By our third year of running the program, we got up to 40 service providers supplying data to our studies, which is where we were about a year ago in April 2008.
At that point, we decided we had enough information where finally we’d have the huge uptake we’d been hoping for. And sure enough, from April 2008 to April 2009, we’ve gone from 40 participants to 130.
Benchmarking Business Performance
We run a number of benchmarking studies each year, so while we may have 130 service providers in our program, the critical mass we need for any individual study is somewhere in the 10 to 15 range, but several of our studies are seeing 30 to 40 providers participating.
