Studying Top Performers

At the ITPI, we help IT decision-makers make better decisions by studying top-performing IT organizations to uncover what drives their success. Our focus is on identifying and sharing the practices that lead to world-class results, enabling other IT organizations to improve their performance.

We don’t conduct product reviews, vendor ratings, or superficial research based on limited conversations. Instead, we emphasize measurable outcomes and data-driven research techniques to pinpoint specific factors that enhance operational performance. Our findings help decision-makers prioritize next steps, understand improvement potential, and effectively communicate plans to their executive teams and boards.

Our Principles

  1. Operational Excellence Matters: Effective management of complex, interdependent, and distributed systems directly impacts results. Variations in standard operating procedures can lead to significant differences in agility, cost efficiency, service levels, and security and compliance performance.
  2. Learning from Top Performers: Process improvement and measured experimentation are crucial, but leveraging proven practices from top performers can accelerate improvement. We believe in the urgency of achieving step-function improvements by adopting successful strategies from leading organizations.
  3. Outcomes-Oriented Research: Research focused on outcomes is both interesting and useful. Understanding what differentiates high performers provides actionable insights, unlike generic statistics that offer limited practical value.

Our Methodology

We collaborate with research organizations sharing our rigorous methodologies, leveraging existing validated quantitative and qualitative research. This partnership enhances our efficiency and broadens the depth of our insights. Our research approach involves:

  1. Topic Selection: Starting with significant research questions to uncover impactful, non-obvious answers.
  2. Interviews: Conducting 10 to 15 interviews with leading firms to identify performance breakthroughs and measurement methods.
  3. Hypothesis Development: Crafting concrete hypotheses about result drivers based on interview findings.
  4. Survey Design: Designing surveys and data collection methods to test these hypotheses.
  5. Data Analysis: Applying statistical techniques to identify factors correlating with higher performance.
  6. Top Performer Differentials: Segmenting the population into top, medium, and low performers to reveal factors linked to better outcomes.

Benchmarking Tools

We use our key findings and extensive data sets to create benchmarking tools that highlight practices driving top performance. These tools enable IT organizations to compare their practices and performance against top, medium, and low performers, offering customized reports with specific steps for improvement.

Driven by curiosity, we strive to uncover what works, helping people make data-driven decisions and guide sustainable change for their organizations. Our partnerships maximize efficiency and ensure our research is robust and comprehensive.

Link to the .pdf: About the IT Process Institute