Knowing which organizations perform the best on any particular dimension used to require subjective surveys or painstaking research. Today, the data to answer those questions exists — it’s captured by the software-as-a-service firms whose services companies use to run their businesses. Mainstream software companies are beginning to hold “data mirrors” up to their customers, allowing scoring and benchmarking of their customers’ strategies. We’ve already seen that it’s possible to use external data to evaluate firms on what business models they are employing, and what those business models mean for their valuations.  Those analyses rely on publicly available data sources, but software providers have accumulated growing amounts of private data on almost every aspect of their customers’ technology, operations, people, and strategies. It’s time that these data accumulators begin to share insights back to the creators of all this data, and several firms are beginning to do so.