eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

Objectives of the Study: This study aims to facilitate the rapprochement of the European higher education benchmarking projects towards a unified European benchmarking project. Total of four higher education IT benchmarking projects are analysed by comparing their categorisation of benchmarking indicators and their data manipulation processes. Four select benchmarking projects are compared in this fashion for the first time. The focus is especially on the Finnish Bencheit project's point of view.

Academic background and methodology: The comparability of European higher education IT benchmarking projects is explored by combining theories from the literature and experience from higher education IT directors. Using case study methods, four IT benchmarking projects are examined, each in a different country. Results are obtained by analysing acquired raw data, reports, documentation, public material, interview data, and by commissioning a questionnaire.

Findings and conclusions: Comparison of the participating projects using the framework shows that their data indicators are currently not very comparable. Most comparable data categories can be found in basic volume and cost data, but almost all advanced - and especially qualitative indicators - are non-comparable. Data collection, validation, and manipulation processed show certain similarities, which can be potentially streamlined without losing data comparability. Successful rapprochement of the existing European higher education IT benchmarking projects requires constant and close cooperation among the projects' managers. Sudden fusion of the existing projects will most likely lead to a failure, not least due to unacceptable sacrifices in lost data collection work over the years. We propose a Co-operation Organisation for coordinating the rapprochement of the European benchmarking projects through gradual streamlining of their operations over consecutive benchmarking cycles.