Benchmarking Benefits
Improves your library’s performance
Gains/Improves upper management support
Builds professional relationships
Proves your library’s value
Notes:
Let’s address this question to find out what benchmarking can do for the library and library staff?
First, it can help you improve your library to better meet the needs of your customers and to make it operate more efficiently and effectively. By identifying best practices you can maximize your current resources. It also can be used to explore a new service or product that a library may want to adopt.
Second, it can be used to help you gain or improve the support of upper management. The thinking behind this is that benchmarking makes you look more proactive, demonstrates that you can operate like a business, shows that the library is solving its own problems with the good of the organization in mind. It makes the library look more like a team player which may protect its budget in the long term or even gain increased resources..
Third, it helps build relationships within the organization and profession. And these types of relationships can be very helpful after the benchmarking study is completed.
Fourth, benchmarking can support corporate, organization or library goals. If the company wants to cut costs, the library can look for ways to help the company or even cut library costs. A benchmarking study can help showcase the library process that is selected for benchmarking or can show why other processes are not selected.
Last, benchmarking can help show how valuable library resources and staff are to the company..