Making Strategic IT/IS Management Comparable: Designing an Instrument for Strategic IT/IS Benchmarking

In light of the continued economic pressure on IT organizations, the efficient delivery of IT/IS services remains a crucial issue. Hence, IT managers have to break down and justify their service delivery costs. For this purpose, many IT executives revert to comparative assessments like IT/IS benchmarking. In recent years, IT/IS benchmarking has been increasingly used to support IT/IS management on a strategic level. This approach has specific requirements for the data collection instrument. Hence, this paper introduces such an instrument for strategic IT/IS benchmarking and presents its development over a period of more than six years, during which it was applied in 126 companies.