Visit the IT department at your school or at a local company and find out whether performance measurements are used. Write a brief report describing your findings.

What will be an ideal response?

System performance measurement, or benchmarking, also is discussed in Chapter 7. In Chapter 12, the focus is on specific performance and workload measurements, such as response time, bandwidth and throughput, and turnaround time. Most network managers use performance measurement software to monitor network performance and detect problems. If students are unable to verify what software is being used, they could perform additional research on the Web to identify examples of performance management programs.