Twenty years on the unglamorous part

Benchmark Consulting is an application transformation company. We have spent two decades on one problem: building faithful, complete, precise descriptions of software systems that are too large and too old for anyone to hold in their head.

It is not the part of modernization that gets talked about. Everyone wants to discuss the target architecture. Very few people want to spend years making sure the description of the source is actually correct, which is unfortunate, because every other decision depends on it.

The same instinct, one layer up

Benchmark is also the maker of IRIS Business Architect, a business and enterprise architecture platform used by architects and portfolio teams to plan change at the level of the organization rather than the code. It has its own home and its own customers, and this site is not about it.

The belief underneath the two is the same one. You cannot change a system safely until somebody can describe it precisely. IRIS describes the business. This describes the code the business actually runs on.

What we believe

The source of truth is the code. Not the documentation, not the architecture diagram, and not what anyone remembers. Everything we produce is derived from what is actually running.

You should own what we build for you. That is why the model is structured on an international standard rather than a format of ours. It works against our commercial interest in lock-in, and we think that is the right trade.

Traceability is not optional. Anything we tell you can be followed back to the line of code that produced it. Analysis that cannot be checked is just a well-formatted opinion.

Be honest about the ceiling. Modernization is being oversold right now, particularly where AI is involved. We would rather tell you what a technique cannot do and be believed about the rest.

Working with us

We are a small, senior team, and we work with organizations that have systems old enough and important enough that getting them wrong is not an option. If that sounds like your situation, we are easy to talk to.