Benchmarking
Turn Spend Into Strategy, With IT Cost Benchmarking
Start using IT Cost Benchmarking for strategic view on technological maturity, innovation capability, and future orientation of IT. Unlock insight to steer, justify, and optimize costs with confidence.
Serviceware’s 2025 ITFM Trend Report shows that improving financial visibility can reduce cost-related queries by 95%; yet most CIOs still struggle to integrate vendor and contract data across the enterprise.
Read the report“With Serviceware we standardized metrics for costs and expenses in order to compare our performance with other market players, now being able to deliver more value to the business.”
Relationship Manager, Procurement & Supply Chain at Petrobras
Turning IT benchmarking into a strategic capability
Dr. Christopher Boortz
Strategic Service Consultant
Internal Baselines
- Problem: Without a baseline, you can’t compare costs meaningfully.
- Solution: Build benchmarks from your own service structure; costs by tower, service, business unit, or region.
- Outcome: Gain a fact-based foundation for strategy and investment.
Peer Group Comparison
- Problem: Comparing against irrelevant peers creates misleading targets.
- Solution: Access validated, context-specific peer data across industries and company sizes.
- Outcome: See where you stand relative to the right peers and identify realistic optimization targets.
Waste & Outlier Detection
- Problem: Overspending and anomalies remain hidden in averages.
- Solution: Detect abnormal costs at service and commodity level.
- Outcome: Eliminate waste, justify spend, and redirect savings to innovation.
Investment Planning
- Problem: Benchmarking often stops at reporting.
- Solution: Link benchmarks to planning, budgeting, and forecasting in Serviceware Financial.
- Outcome: Inform decisions about where to invest, cut, or renegotiate.
Procurement-Ready Data
- Problem: Vendor negotiations lack objective evidence.
- Solution: Use benchmark data in procurement to validate pricing and contract terms.
- Outcome: Unlock 15–30% savings in IT service contracts.
Plan smarter with AI-assisted forecasts and orchestrated workflows
Product Tour
See how Serviceware Financial turns budgeting chaos into a streamlined process. The video walks through building a central planning model, replacing Excel with governed workflows, and using AI to auto-suggest forecasts. You’ll see how to plan by cost center, project, or vendor, compare scenarios in real time, and cut weeks from planning cycles, all while keeping Finance and IT aligned.
Key Takeaways:
- Replace Excel chaos with one platform
- Align top-down and bottom-up planning
- Test scenarios before you commit
- Use AI to forecast with confidence
- Shorten cycles by weeks
Implementation in 3 Steps: From Consultation to Insights in Days
Sign up for a free benchmarking consultation and quickly uncover actionable insights across 14 IT towers, 3 cost categories, and 10 services.
Integrations
Let’s Walk Through IT Cost Benchmarking in Action
In 20 minutes, we’ll show you how to benchmark with purpose and use the insights to lead IT cost decisions with confidence.
Webinars on ITFM, TBM and FinOps
Frequently Asked Questions
IT cost benchmarking compares your service costs against internal baselines or external peer data. It helps IT leaders spot inefficiencies, justify investments, and align spend with value.
You can track Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). IT spend as % of revenue, cost per user/service, and service-specific spend by geographic region or business unit. As part of the Serviceware Benchmarking Initiative, Benchmarks cover 14 IT towers, 3 major cost categories, and 10 key commodity services.
No. Serviceware benchmarking is effortless. It typically requires just 1–2 days of effort from your IT controller plus selective support from a subject matter expert.
Our data comes from large Serviceware customers, validated by leading consultancy standards (e.g., top-four firms) and normalized to ensure reliable, comparable insights.
That’s the value. Our Strategic Service Consultants partner with you to put results in context, show where you stand, and help derive the right actions.
The framework applies across industries and structures, with metrics covering 14 IT towers, 3 categories, and 10 services, tailored enough to make findings actionable.
Customers typically unlock 15–30% savings in IT service contracts.
Benchmarking is fast; implementation within 8 weeks, insights available within days.
Serviceware IT cost benchmarking includes a short discovery workshop, data upload, validation, and analysis phase. Results and insights are delivered within eight weeks, with actionable recommendations presented to IT and finance leaders.