“By benchmarking others, you can learn so much about your own personal branding.” Benchmarking is one of the effective way of knowledge management metric. It is the hunt for industry wide best practices that leads to superior performance. It is a fairly straightforward knowledge management metric that represents a good starting point.  

 Benchmarking fundamentally comprises of a study of similar organizations to determine how things are done best in order to adapt these methods for their own use. Benchmarking can be best understand by a very popular Hindu proverb – “know the best to become the best.”

In software development, there are two general types of benchmarking: Internal Benchmarking and external benchmarking. In internal benchmarking, comparisons is done against other units within the same company or a comparison of a single unit over different time periods. On contrary, in external benchmarking, comparison is done with other companies. 

Just like Benchmarking, Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is also a Knowledge management metric.  A Balanced Scorecard method is a management and judgement system that enables enterprise to clarify their version and strategy and which translates them into actions. It also offers feedback on both the internal processes and external results in order to continuously improve strategic performance and results. 

It is a conceptual framework for converting an organization’s goal into a set of performance indicators distributed among four dimensions: Financial Dimensions, Customer Dimensions, Internal Business Process, Learning and growth 

Financial dimension involves measures such as operating income, return on capital employed, and economic value added.  Customer Dimension is associated with measures like customer satisfaction, retention, and market share in targeted segments. Internal business processes consists of measures like cost, throughput and quality. Learning and growth addresses measures like worker’s satisfaction, retention and skill sets. 

With the help of balanced scorecard, and enterprise can monitor both its current performance (Finances, customer satisfaction, and business process results) and it efforts to enhance processes, encourage and educate individuals, and improve information system and its ability to learn and improve.

This method is applicable to both profitable and non-profitable enterprises as well as to both public and private sector companies. It provides a number of significant advantages, including the translation of abstract goals into action items that can be continuously monitored.  In spite of this, the balanced scorecard technique provides objective measures of the current scenario, and help initiate the changes needed to move from the current to the desired future state of the organization.