Improve institutional effectiveness when traditional benchmarking fails

Organizational benchmarking efforts have been a staple of the management consulting industry for decades and are often seen as the prime decision support tool for improving efficiency, effectiveness, or organizational structure. In many ways benchmarking serves this purpose well, providing a reference model for what an organization could look like based on how peers have configured their organizations. They can give you the justification you need for an additional role or make the case to eliminate one.

However, for benchmarking to be effective, the organizations being compared and the units making up those organizations need to be similar enough for the comparisons to be credible—otherwise, the case for change can quickly unravel. In the corporate sector, at least in the U.S., organizational benchmarking can be effective, especially for common staff functions. There are well-established roles and responsibilities for talent and finance, for example, and those roles can be organized similarly from business to business. This commonality in organizational structures and roles in the enterprise space is why organizational benchmarking efforts can be effective in the corporate sector.

The success of benchmarking in business leads to an entirely reasonable but misguided assumption that benchmarking can work the same way in higher education.

With the demographic cliff arriving and accelerating non-consumption—many institutions find themselves in structural deficits or see they must plan for a smaller organization today to ensure they can deliver on their mission tomorrow.

For the past year, we’ve been investigating the best ways to support our partners who find themselves in this unenviable position. We landed in a surprising place after poring over our research and conducting more than 60 interviews with chief business officers (CBO) from the U.S., Canada, U.K., and New Zealand. Many of the CBOs we interviewed had been involved in custom benchmarking engagements over the years, and a common thread emerged that is best encapsulated in this quip from the CBO of a large R1:

We heard similar stories time and time again of expensive, failed benchmarking exercises that took too long to be useful, did not include similar enough peers, and ended in no change. In our relatively small interview campaign, we were surprised to find five of our partners had also recently cancelled or were planning to cancel benchmarking services for similar reasons. At our CBO Roundtable last spring, I shared some of what we had found and was again surprised to see so many heads nodding along.

Putting it all together, my team said there must be a different way—which is why we developed the Administrative Effectiveness Index. Our new tool is not a classic benchmarking engagement that counts how many people are doing what, how fast they do it, and who they report to. Instead, we’ve developed a tool that quickly, comprehensively, and objectively assesses 19 critical, strategic capabilities that we know have a disproportionate impact on organizational performance.

Download the Framework

The survey-based experience takes 45 minutes or less for each participant to provide input. We ask to what extent specific attributes of practice for each capability are consistent at your institution and to what extent that capability is a barrier to achieving your strategic goals and objectives. Using that data, we determine your level of maturity relative to EAB best practices for each of the 19 business capabilities we assess. We then provide a prioritized roadmap with prescriptive guidance on which of those capabilities may be the largest driving forces to improve institutional effectiveness.

In essence, we’re less concerned with how many people are doing what and more interested in the organizing principles and processes that guide how work is done at your institution.

We’re currently recruiting for our alpha cohort, which will launch in January 2025. If you’re interested in being one of the first to experience the tool, please complete the form below to learn more. Space in the alpha cohort is limited to 30.