IWA International Conference on Benchmarking and Performance Assessment 2011

In late 2010 a new Specialist Group on Performance Assessment and Benchmarking is being created in IWA, and a new manual of best practices, this time covering Benchmarking will be published jointly with AWWA. The Pi2011 conference in Valencia will be the first international conference organized by this new group and an opportunity to discover the new IWA benchmarking framework and discuss about it. However, Pi2011 will not be the first conference of its kind. As a matter of fact, it will be the fourth edition after successful conferences in Amsterdam and Valencia. In each one of those events, we saw an increasing number of delegates, but also of ongoing projects and real cases being discussed, and I am sure that Pi2011 will only confirm that trend. The water industry is already showing maturity in accepting benchmarking and performance assessment as powerful decision making tools. However, we all know that continuous improvement is a never-ending cycle and conferences like Pi2011 represent the perfect chance to learn from others; the very core of benchmarking. Indicators and benchmarking are proving to be a powerful tool also in low and medium income countries. In the coming years we will see an increase in projects focused on the poor that will certainly benefit from previous work, but will also provide a wealth of best practices for the rest of the world.