Benchmarking: Seeking Best Practice

ABSTRACT Best Practice Benchmarking (BPB) is a legitimate and rigorous evaluation methodology for organizations that aspire to become learning organizations who demonstrate best practice in products, services, and processes. The focus of this article is to describe BPB as a knowledge sharing evaluation methodology that offers a structured and methodical approach to comparing existing products, services, and processes. The approach to reasoning is deductive as there is a hypothesis; for example, is our product contemporary? Or unique? Or do we have a competitive advantage? As evaluators and evaluation operate in the tactical arena, it makes sense that evaluators would value and take a formal approach to benchmarking by adopting BPB as one methodology. On another level, when evaluators are drawn into the policy design space, policy borrowing is an appropriate activity to inform strategy. Policy borrowing is an extension of benchmarking as it moves benchmarking into the policy domain, where the product under comparison is a policy. Policy borrowing is where knowledge sharing (identifying best practice policy implementation) leads to knowledge transfer (contextual implementation of best practice policy). Grounded in the real‐world experience of the authors as internal evaluators, this article describes the BPB methodology and outline where this methodology is appropriate for both the tactical (evaluation) and strategic (policy) levels