Translating "Corporate Strategy" methods to the HR world

In reading through "Lean Six Sigma for Service" (Michael L. George), I started thinking about the ways we leverage our HR team's priorities in our LSS deployment. 

George talks about how to benchmark against competitors on ROIC, WACC and EP (Economic Profit, the difference between the ROIC % and WACC %).  These are fairly easy numbers to obtain through annual reports, and can certainly be used as the cornerstone of resource deployment in an organization.
But we live in a slightly different world.  We are, in some respects, one of the largest costs of an organization.  These calculations, while meaningful, don't always help in deploying resources through HR.  I'm curious as to how we benchmark performance with that in mind. 
Do you benchmark against HR teams in your market sector, direct competitors, local companies, similar sized organizations, or some other group?
What are the key metrics you use for that comparison?  HR cost per FTE?  Total HR spend?  Turnover?  Something else?
Finally, how do you leverage that information to drive your deployment, and how often do you re-examine that strategy?

Obama appoints "Chief Performance Officer"

In the interest of keeping politics at a minimum, I won't ask people's opinions of the incoming administration (or outgoing, for that matter, though civil discussion is always welcome), I thought this new post was interesting enough to mention.  From Yahoo! News...

President-elect Barack Obama...named on Wednesday a former Treasury official as the first U.S. "chief performance officer" to oversee budget and spending reform.

"We can no longer afford to sustain the old ways when we know there are new and more efficient ways of getting the job done...Even in good times, Washington can't afford to continue these bad practices. In bad times, it's absolutely imperative that Washington stop them," Obama said.

Obama has repeatedly promised that his administration will go "line by line" over its budgets -- a task that will now fall to Killefer and Obama's nominee to as White House budget chief Peter Orszag.


I thought it interesting to see a high level position specifically designed to make the entire system work better, though it sounds more like a finance watchdog than a Lean practitioner position.  With all the waste that the new administration expects to find, let's hope they engage a few people who know how to clear it out and streamline the system.  That would get us past removing deadwood and start the country down it's own Lean transformation.