A benchmark captured and used as a reference point for later comparison.
It is important that baselines as documents are recognized and accepted throughout the organization. Baseline must be established at each level: strategic goals, and objectives, tactical process maturity and operational metrics and KPIs.
Examples
1. A Service Level Achievement Baseline can be used as a starting point to measure the effect of a Service Improvement Plan.
2. A performance Baseline can be used to measure changes in performance over the lifetime of an IT service.
3. A Configuration Management baseline can be used to enable the IT infrastructure to be restored to a known configuration if a change or release fails.