MIT/Stanford Help Desk Benchmarking Project

Welcome to the MIT/Stanford Help Desk Benchmarking Project web site.

Beginning in Summer 2002, MIT and Stanford embarked on a joint effort to develop meaningful comparative data and to understand each other's IT services and performance. After nearly a decade of significant IT investments, both campuses are asking, "How are we performing? How can we use our IT systems to help us manage ourselves and our investments better?" The first IT area selected for study was the IT Help Desk.

This site includes documents and data to help other schools conduct their own benchmarking studies or use the MIT/Stanford data for their own comparisons.

As a result of an 18-month effort, MIT and Stanford have learned valuable lessons about:

• Conducting comparisons and about specific metrics for IT services.
• Introducing a new tool on campus: a "dashboard " chart, which, like an airplane's cockpit, monitors and summarizes important performance indicators at a glance.

• Making relevant, useful data be part of management decision-making and assessment. We're shifting from management by personality or anecdote and instead are growing accustomed to managing with facts.

We invite you to explore the project documentation, presentations, and data and to begin your own benchmarking journey.