Most executives understand that a business’ performance is only significant when it is benchmarked against its competitors. As an accepted business best practice it is expected that the functioning of an individual organization will be measured against other like type organizations. This practice of benchmarking oneself against competitors should be no different for any IT organization. There can be no better instrument to utilize then benchmarking to insure whether the IT operation is providing a competitive product. Without this peer to peer comparison it would be difficult at best to define if IT’s performance is weak, competitive or an industry leader. Of course in order to benchmark you must first determine are my processes mature enough to ensure that I can gather the significant data needed for this undertaking. If not then your resources would be better utilized in first assessing your processes maturity through tools such as the ITIL Process Maturity Framework (PMF