Exploring the path to success: A review of the strategic IT benchmarking literature

IT organizations use strategic IT benchmarking (SITBM) to revise IT strategies or perform internal marketing. Despite benchmarking’s long tradition, many SITBM initiatives do not reveal the desired outcomes. The vast body of knowledge on benchmarking and IT management does not help overcome the challenges of successful SITBM. We therefore synthesize existing research on IT management and benchmarking into a concept relationship map and derive future research avenues. We find that there is much literature on how to produce SITBM results. However, research does not explain how these results are transformed into outcome – essentially the problem many practitioners struggle with.