The Society of IT Management (Socitm) is pressing the channel to deliver after its development of benchmarking for partnerships and outsourced contracts in the public sector.

The benchmarking service is designed to ensure that local authorities and other public service organisations are able to measure and monitor the performance of their outsourced ICT services against a peer group of other outsourced authorities.

The service was launched last week after Socitm's success with other benchmarking processes involving 178 local authorities, social housing organisations and education authorities.

"Organisations that outsource don't have as many ways to control contracts as those using internal resources. This is about bringing the public sector and the outsourcer together," said Martin Greenwood, Socitm insight programme manager.

The new service will also measure participating authorities' performance against Socitm's key performance indicators (KPI), covering areas such as user satisfaction, resolution of operational problems and project management.

Socitm also claimed that benchmarking allows the public sector to benefit from objective information about how their IT partners are performing.

Data from a separate Socitm survey showed that projects that are outsourced generally have a 13 per cent lower user-satisfaction rate than those which are not.

John Griffith, UK country manager at web integrator Kapow Technology, said benchmarks put resellers under pressure: "Benchmarking always relies on cross-disciplines, over which resellers don't always have complete control. It will put them under a lot of pressure to perform and that could be both good and bad."

Mike Williams, public sector sales manager at VAR Misco, said: "The reseller and the organisation need to review KPI's on a monthly basis. Benchmarking with resellers is a common process in the public sector."