ARC held its own press conference this evening to announce progress on the Benchmarking Consortium they first talked about a year ago, here in Orlando. They have working groups, they have user company sponsors and participants, they have even got some data. They need lots more data, and they need many more end user companies to participate in this Consortium effort. According to John Wason and Dick Hill, of ARC, they need more suggestions for metrics, too. The benefits to companies like Hercules, ably represented at the press conference by Gary Lipson, are obvious. They get to see how they stack up internally, and against their competition, and they get to slice and dice the data many different ways. The benefits to readers of Control and the other magazines present, unless you are a member of the Consortium, are less obvious...in fact, they are difficult to see at all, since the data, and the conclusions made from it, at least currently, are both secret and the property of ARC. It would be very nice if ARC saw itself as the custodian of the end-users' data, and began to regularly publish redactions of it that anyone, not just ARC clients and Consortium members, could see and learn from.

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