Development of Benchmarking in the Public Sector

Public administration organizations have the opportunity to use a wide range of systemic tools to improve their processes and performance and thereby enhance the quality of the results and impacts of their activities. Benchmarking is one of these systemic tools and is suitable for all types of public administration organizations. It is based on the idea that if there is a procedure somewhere (in another organization) that makes it possible to achieve better results, it is more advantageous to adopt this procedure than for an organization to create something “original”.

At present, the use of benchmarking among public administration organizations is sporadic, although there are many examples of its successful application, including in European Union countries. The ambition of the presented methodology is to help incorporate benchmarking among standard improvement tools also within public administration organizations in the Slovak Republic.

Experience from the implementation of CAF in Slovakia shows that there is still significant potential for improving the management of public administration organizations with a focus on results. The PDCA cycle, used in the assessment of enablers criteria, requires the evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of applied approaches, primarily through the results achieved in the administered area and in the management of the organization itself. It is precisely here that benchmarking methodology has an irreplaceable role, as its logic encourages organizations to focus on their areas for improvement, measure results in these areas and compare their own results with the best ones (where possible). Equally valuable is an approach in which several organizations create so-called benchmarking partnerships and jointly, through the results of specific benchmarking partners, identify and adopt good practice. Good practice is a procedure, arrangement or approach to developing and making resources available that enables the achievement of such results by the best among the benchmarking partners.

A necessary precondition for the implementation of benchmarking is the maturity of a public administration organization, which may be demonstrated by the fact that it knows its strengths but also understands where it needs to improve. Its strengths can be offered to other organizations as good practice, while areas for improvement can be addressed when defining the subject of benchmarking.