After the Dot Com boom and bust took out my company Genuity, I was on the search again for a new job. My friend Scott worked in Sales at Gomez and introduced me to the manager there. It look a few months (okay half a year) to get the job running the Benchmark practice.  This was a position we both constructed and were excited to bring to the customers. I was part product manager, part consultant, and part company spokesman. Customers bought the benchmark product to size up their Internet Performance against their peers.

My biggest accomplishment was collaborating with my Marketing colleagues (Cathy and William) to get Gomez embedded with Internet Retailer. In 2008 I was able to speak at an Internet Retailer conference with 600 people in the audience.  Now that was a big audience!  I came up with the new metric, “Consistency”, which is still being used today.

So what is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is an ongoing, systematic process for measuring and comparing the work processes of one institution to those of another, by bringing an external focus to internal activities, functions, or operations.

Benchmarking provides key personnel, in charge of processes, with an external standard for measuring the quality and cost of internal activities, and help identify where opportunities for improvement may reside.

Now what is Performance Benchmarking?

Moving the classic discipline of benchmarking online, Performance Benchmarking uses various technologies to collect metrics for competing organizations in order to achieve competitive information. The first wave of Performance Benchmarking leverages synthetic monitoring tools from Gomez (now Compuware) and Keynote. These companies provide the technology to systematically measure common metrics of different web sites in a way to compare them.