The Complete History of the TBM Council

I. Foundations and Prehistory (1998–2011)

The origins of the Technology Business Management (TBM) Council trace back to the late 1990s in Kansas City, where Chris Pick, Todd Tucker, and Josh Harbert began working together at Ernst & Young. Chris, originally from Calgary and steeped in activity-based costing, had come to the U.S. to lead EY’s security practice. Todd brought financial modeling and benchmarking experience, while Josh specialized in logistics and partner operations. Their early collaborations, particularly on IT and security projects with Sprint, revealed a shared passion for structured analysis, executive engagement, and operational storytelling. “We weren’t academics,” Todd Tucker would later recall. “We were practitioners who needed answers that worked in the real world.”

After leaving EY in the early 2000s, the trio joined PentaSafe, a Houston-based security software company. There, they launched the Human Firewall Council—a provocative, manifesto-style campaign built around the idea that “the weakest link in security is people.” The Council wasn’t a formal institution, but it demonstrated the power of community-led advocacy. It blended content, a unifying message, and credibility-building tactics to position PentaSafe’s solutions in a crowded market. That positioning helped pave the way for the company’s acquisition by NetIQ in 2002. As Chris Pick later reflected, “The Human Firewall was our prototype. TBM was the evolution.”

Chris Pick stayed on at NetIQ as Chief Marketing Officer, where he continued refining his approach to narrative-driven category creation. By the time he joined Austin Ventures in 2004, and later Apptio in 2010, he had fully internalized the idea that professional disciplines could be shaped by strategic content, peer community, and metrics. At Apptio—then still an emerging SaaS company—he was tasked by Andreessen Horowitz with developing a category around what was loosely called “IT Financial Management.”

Soon after joining Apptio, CEO Sunny Gupta gave Chris a list of top-tier CIOs—including Rebecca Jacoby (Cisco), Tim Campos (Facebook), Don Duet (Goldman Sachs), and Larry Godec (First American)—and challenged him to get their buy-in. Chris immediately recognized the challenge: for these CIOs to participate publicly, the effort had to be clearly decoupled from Apptio’s commercial interests. “Neutrality wasn’t a buzzword—it was the price of participation,” he later said. The solution would be something bigger—a neutral, nonprofit platform that could act as a community and standards body. 

By then, Apptio had already been hosting periodic roundtables with CIOs—an informal “CIO Council” that started around 2007. These gatherings were instrumental in testing early ideas and creating alignment across executives. By 2010, the phrase “Technology Business Management” had emerged as a unifying label for a set of shared goals: managing IT costs transparently, modeling services, and tying technology investments to business outcomes.

A pivotal moment came in October 2011, with the release of IT-as-a-Service: Guiding Principles for Achieving Financial Transparency, a whitepaper co-branded with EMC. Although not formally under a TBM Council banner, the document reflected the emerging discipline: collaboratively authored, rooted in practical challenges, and designed to elevate IT leadership. It signaled that this was more than marketing—it was the beginning of a standards-driven movement. “What made the TBM Council work,” Chris Pick later explained, “was that it started with a manifesto, not a marketing pitch.”

At Cisco, Rebecca Jacoby had established organizing principles through her work on services transformation, emphasizing actionable cost transparency and alignment to business services. Building upon these principles, Ed Hayman independently developed a cost model at Expedia starting in 2009 that would become foundational to TBM. Trained in nuclear engineering, Hayman rejected traditional ITFM approaches, which he found overly abstract and disconnected from operational detail. “This wasn’t theory for me—I had to build something the CFO could actually use,” he explained. Instead, he employed a layered systems engineering mindset, using Visio diagrams to map cost pools tied to the general ledger, infrastructure towers like compute and storage, and direct service links to Expedia’s business units.

His model provided CFO-ready insights into unit economics, enabling cost-per-service analysis grounded in real-world allocations. Rather than aiming for exhaustive service catalogs, Hayman offered a pragmatic approach: “People wanted perfect service catalogs,” Hayman said. “I gave them something usable instead.” He frequently emphasized usefulness over perfection, stating: “Here’s a starting point—good enough to use now, and refine over time.”

By 2011, Hayman joined Apptio and brought the model with him. Internally, the idea emerged to position it as a reusable framework—referred to informally as the Apptio Unified Model, or “Atom,”—as part of a broader effort to standardize the taxonomy across clients. With the model’s influence growing, it catalyzed the formation of a TBM Standards Committee in early 2012, where Hayman helped guide the formalization of the taxonomy’s first version.

Also inspiring the vision was Intel’s Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), launched in 2010. The ODCA modeled how a vendor-neutral, CIO-led body could create actionable standards for an evolving tech landscape. While the ODCA provided a valuable example of a nonprofit structure, substantial effort was still required to independently create the TBM Council’s governance and bylaws, carefully tailored to the specific needs and vision of the TBM community.

By the end of 2011, the groundwork was complete. The team had the experience, the relationships, and now the inspiration for an enduring platform. TBM would need a home—and the Council was ready to be built.

II. Formation of the TBM Council (2011–2012)

In late 2011, Chris Pick began formalizing the leadership structure for the TBM Council. The initial CIO Advisory Group included Jacoby, Campos, Duet, and Godec—each bringing not only their expertise but, crucially, the strength of their enterprise brands. These respected brands played a pivotal role in establishing credibility and encouraging other enterprises to follow the lead of these innovative organizations. These executives weren’t just reacting to Apptio’s roadmap; they were actively shaping the definition of an emerging discipline.

To ensure that TBM was recognized as an industry-wide effort, the Council was incorporated as a nonprofit in Delaware in April 2012. Chris Pick became its founding President. Rebecca Jacoby and Larry Godec were named co-chairs of the board. This move wasn’t just symbolic—it created the governance structure needed to separate the Council from Apptio, enabling wider participation from CIOs at companies with strict endorsement policies.

Though independent, the Council relied heavily on Apptio in its early days. Apptio provided staffing, event support, marketing infrastructure, and anonymized customer data. Todd Tucker led much of the content development work, drawing on his experience in benchmarking and research. As he later put it, “Apptio donated IP and provided real-world data from customer implementations, which made content development for the book and standards more effective.”

From the very beginning, the Council’s mandate was clear: foster collaboration, deliver rigorous education, and establish shared standards that IT leaders could trust. Its goal was not to churn out marketing materials but to create genuinely value-added, practical resources—frameworks, tools, and guidance grounded in scientific rigor—that individuals, teams, and organizations could apply immediately to manage the cost, quality, and value of their technology services. This unwavering focus on practical, peer-driven content laid the foundation for all subsequent Council outputs.

The Council’s first flagship deliverable was the TBM Index, released in September 2012 in partnership with KPMG. Designed as a benchmarking instrument, the Index allowed organizations to assess their maturity across core TBM dimensions—cost transparency, service modeling, and value realization. Notably, Eric Johnson of Dartmouth College played a key role by involving MBA students to conduct essential research and develop the mathematical algorithms underlying the Index. By enabling CIOs to self-assess, the Index simultaneously generated data that could inform the evolution of the TBM taxonomy.

Next came the Apple iBook, Technology Business Management: A Business-Driven Approach to Managing the Costs of IT. Released one chapter at a time starting in October 2012, the iBook was a multimedia manifesto. It featured interactive graphics, embedded videos, and peer comparison tools. Readers authenticated via LinkedIn, unlocking surveys that linked narrative content to real benchmarking insights. The incremental chapter releases allowed the Council to gather feedback, test ideas, and iterate. “We created one chapter at a time for the iBook,” Tucker recalled. “Each was a living, evolving draft of what became the TBM Book.” Contributors like Ed Hayman played a key role in shaping the content, ensuring that it reflected field-tested practices.

Though innovative, the iBook was difficult to maintain. Its complexity—especially around platform dependencies and authentication—limited its long-term viability. Still, it succeeded in setting a tone: TBM was not a static model, but a living framework designed to evolve through practitioner input. The content created for the iBook would later form the foundation of the 2016 TBM Book and help inform the curriculum for the Council’s certification program.

Perhaps most significantly, the Council’s early phase revealed a deepening ideological shift. TBM had started as a way to achieve cost transparency, but the CIOs involved were pushing it further. They wanted to demonstrate business value, drive agility, and elevate IT’s role from cost center to strategic enabler. The shift from managing spend to proving value became a core theme of the Council’s next chapter—and would guide the development of its most enduring standards.

III. Expansion and Standardization (2013–2016)

By mid-2013, the TBM Council had surpassed 1,000 members and was gaining visibility across industries. In November 2013, it hosted its first large-scale TBM Conference in Seattle, marking a new phase of expansion. These events brought together CIOs, CFOs, and technology finance leaders to discuss benchmarks, present case studies, and collaborate on future standards.  The annual conference quickly became the Council’s signature gathering, anchoring its calendar and accelerating its work.

One of the most important outputs of this period was the formal release of the TBM Taxonomy 1.0 in 2014. Building on Ed Hayman’s original framework, the taxonomy provided a common language for classifying IT costs and linking them to business services. Hayman chaired the taxonomy subcommittee, translating lessons from his early work at Expedia into formal definitions. “The taxonomy didn’t exist until we wrote it together—line by line, dollar by dollar,” said Todd Tucker. The taxonomy helped CIOs and CFOs speak the same language—aligning technical detail with financial and business relevance.

Beginning in late 2014, the Council under Executive Director Eileen Wade made community engagement a strategic priority. Facing limited dedicated resources, Todd Tucker and Wade relied on practitioner volunteers to co-drive research and standards evolution through:

• Monthly Webinars: Dedicated sessions covering topics of importance to the TBM community.
• Local Interest Groups (LIGs): Regional meet-ups where members surfaced frontline challenges and shared best practices.
• Strategy Communities: Member-led working groups with annual charters, tasked with producing conference presentations or white papers on specific TBM topics.

These member-centric activities created two critical membership growth waves (2015–2017 and again 2021–2023). They ensured the taxonomy—and all deliverables—were continuously shaped by real-world experience. Members became powerful advocates, both validating the Council’s work and inspiring peers to join.

Meanwhile, the Council experimented with new tools. In 2015, Hayman and others built the TBM Explorer—a web-based visualization tool hosted on AWS. It allowed practitioners to explore taxonomy layers, services, and cost structures interactively. Though it remained in beta and was never publicly launched, it served as a testbed for future tooling.

Hayman also co-led the TBM Metrics initiative, an attempt to standardize KPIs across the TBM discipline. These efforts, also shared through webinars, helped shape the Council’s approach to benchmarking and informed future content strategy. Importantly, Hayman advocated for open sharing of the taxonomy and related models—believing the standard would only thrive if it was widely accessible. This principle influenced the Council’s long-term stance on publishing open reference models.

Education and certification emerged as central priorities for the Council’s expanding agenda. In 2016, the Council published Technology Business Management: The Four Value Conversations CIOs Must Have With Their Businesses, authored by Todd Tucker. The book formalized the TBM discipline in print for the first time, distilling years of practitioner input and guidance into a cohesive framework. While it drew on material from the earlier iBook, its release marked a significant milestone in the professionalization of TBM—offering a definitive resource that CIOs, CFOs, and IT leaders could reference to align technology investment with business strategy. “Publishing the book wasn’t the end,” Tucker later reflected. “It was a milestone. TBM kept evolving.” The book’s publication also served as a catalyst for the Council’s broader education and certification initiatives, cementing its role as the steward of the TBM body of knowledge.

It was against this backdrop that the Certified TBM Executive (CTBME) program gained traction across both public and private sectors. Though launched in 2016, it rapidly matured into a polished, high-demand credential: a 16-hour foundation course delivered over four half-day sessions, covering the TBM framework, taxonomy, metrics, and real-world IT-finance alignment. Participants sat a rigorous closed-book online exam and—once certified—were required to renew every two years through continuing-education credits. As Todd Tucker explained, “We wanted a credential that said: you understand TBM, not just Apptio.” With accredited instructors and growing international reach, the CTBME quickly became a cornerstone of TBM professional development—solidifying the Council’s role in discipline stewardship.

Remarkably, the entire go-to-market engine ran on a two-person team. Todd was the architect of the curriculum and led many of the early sessions—especially those tailored for federal audiences—while Eileen Wade developed the program’s revenue model, managed all certification logistics, and drove enrollment and marketing.

At the annual TBM Conference in San Diego, the Council formally released TBM Taxonomy 2.0, marking its first major revision since the original 2014 publication. Version 2.0 introduced a new “Services” layer above the core cost pools and towers, reflecting growing practitioner demand for a standard way to map IT capabilities directly to business-facing services. The updated model also incorporated feedback from over 200 participating organizations, refined definitions for resource towers (compute, storage, network, database), and provided clear guidelines for extending the taxonomy to accommodate emerging technologies such as cloud-native platforms. This release underscored the Council’s commitment to keeping the standard responsive to real-world needs and set the stage for the workgroups that would drive future quarterly updates.

By the end of 2016, the Council had evolved into a professional institution. It governed a recognized standard, produced globally used benchmarks, ran influential events, and offered training and certification programs. TBM had matured into a discipline with its own vocabulary, community, and trajectory—and the Council had become its most authoritative voice.

IV. Shifting Gears: From Peak to Pivot (2017–2020)

By 2017, the TBM Council had firmly established itself as a leading authority in technology business management. The annual TBM Conference had become a cornerstone event, drawing a diverse array of CIOs, CFOs, and technology leaders from around the world. That year, the Council introduced new categories to the TBM Council Awards to recognize organizations that exemplified excellence in TBM practices. “The Awards gave us stories. People could point to results, not just frameworks,” recalled Jack Bischof. SunTrust Bank, for instance, was honored for its innovative use of TBM to shift IT spending from maintenance to strategic initiatives, aligning technology investments with business objectives.

One of the most significant developments during this period was the TBM Council’s engagement with the U.S. federal government, which culminated in the creation of the Federal Technology Investment Management (FTIM) Commission—also referred to as the Federal Cost Commission. Working closely with GSA CIO David Shive, Council leaders navigated the requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act to establish a formal advisory body. The initiative gained national prominence with the “TBM at the White House” event held in November 2017, where the Council presented its framework to government officials as a model for financial transparency and IT value realization. This event catalyzed a federal mandate: agencies were instructed to adopt TBM principles in their reporting and investment planning. The FTIM Commission served as the formal structure for these reforms, defining cost models and aligning TBM standards with federal priorities. This visibility amplified TBM’s relevance at the national level and spurred wider public sector adoption.

It was against this backdrop that the Certified TBM Executive (CTBME) program gained traction across both public and private sectors. Though launched in 2016, it was during this period that the program reached new levels of maturity and adoption. The curriculum, built from the TBM Book and iBook, had evolved through iterative feedback and was refined into a polished training experience. The Council initially lacked the infrastructure to accept credit card payments directly, leading staff to use Cvent—an event registration platform—to manage transactions. Todd Tucker, the program’s original architect, led many of the early sessions himself—especially those tailored for federal audiences—while corporate cohorts across finance, healthcare, and technology industries were trained by other certified instructors.

Beyond traditional instructor-led sessions, there were ambitions to expand TBM education into higher learning institutions. Josh Harbert recalled conversations about developing graduate-level curricula, and there were early efforts to engage with academic partners to formalize TBM as a recognized field of study. While these initiatives remained exploratory, they reflected the Council’s long-term vision for educational infrastructure.

In November 2018, at the TBM Conference in Las Vegas, the Council’s Standards Committee—made up of volunteer CIOs, implementation partners, and subject-matter experts—formally released TBM Taxonomy 3.0 as one of the centerpiece announcements of the event. Over the preceding months, workgroup calls and regional summits had solicited hundreds of member suggestions and use-case stories, which were woven into the new “Products & Services” layer and the clarified tower definitions. The taxonomy launch was celebrated in a dedicated conference workshop—where attendees explored interactive exercises mapping their own organization’s service portfolios—and featured prominently in that year’s TBM Awards ceremony, underscoring its role as both a practical benchmarking tool and a community-driven standard for translating IT spend into business capabilities.

Key departures from the team—Eileen Wade in 2018, followed by Josh Harbert and founding President Chris Pick in 2019—marked critical pivot points in the Council’s evolution. Although Pick’s exit happened around the same time as Apptio’s acquisition by Vista Equity Partners and the appointment of a new CMO, his decision to depart was entirely personal. In the wake of these departures, Todd Tucker stepped into the General Manager role to maintain operational continuity and preserve the Council’s mission.

From its inception, the TBM Council was hosted within Apptio’s Marketing organization—but in a highly atypical reporting structure. Under Chris Pick’s tenure as CMO, Marketing sat alongside Sales at the executive table, giving the Council a degree of strategic autonomy and shielding its nonprofit mission from direct revenue pressures. Beginning in late 2018, Apptio reorganized: Marketing was folded into the Sales organization, and the Council’s home shifted from a peer of Sales to a subordinate function. This realignment fundamentally altered the Council’s governance—decisions became subject to sales quotas, event agendas tilted toward product-led pitches, and staffing priorities were recalibrated for pipeline generation. The result was a palpable loss of independence and nonprofit-focused stewardship that set the stage for the Council’s subsequent operational challenges.

Dedicated staffing declined, and the TBM Conference was rebranded as the “Apptio TBM Conference,” a move that symbolized the growing entanglement between the nonprofit Council and its corporate sponsor. This branding shift, which lasted until approximately 2022, was emblematic of a broader trend: Council events, messaging, and content were increasingly shaped by Apptio’s marketing imperatives. Despite Tucker’s continued efforts, the Council’s visibility and strategic clarity diminished. As a result, major initiatives—such as standards development and thought leadership—saw limited activity.

Building on the momentum from the White House TBM Summit in November 2017, the U.S. federal government began formalizing its approach to Technology Business Management through key strategic publications. In March 2019, the General Services Administration released the Technology Business Management Playbook, a how-to guide designed to help agencies implement TBM effectively. The Playbook provided practical guidance, standard reporting templates, and field-tested lessons to enable CIOs and finance leaders to “run IT like a business,” improve transparency, and better align technology investments with agency missions.

This foundational effort was followed in September 2020 by the release of the IT Spending Transparency Maturity Model, a structured benchmark developed by the CIO Council’s Federal Technology Investment Management Community of Practice in collaboration with REI Systems and other industry contributors. The model provided agencies with a consensus-based framework for evaluating maturity across six critical domains: engagement, taxonomy, data, automation, reporting, and value. Together, these initiatives marked major milestones in public-sector TBM adoption, reinforcing the federal government’s leadership in operationalizing TBM principles and setting the stage for wider adoption across both government and industry.

As COVID-19 brought in-person events to an abrupt halt in early 2020, the TBM Council met the challenge head-on. Recognizing that community connection was more vital than ever, the team launched TBM Tuesdays, a weekly webcast series that quickly became the Council’s cornerstone virtual engagement. What began as a stopgap—when an impromptu webinar drew record attendance—soon evolved into a full-fledged program of expert panels, peer case studies, and live Q&A, ensuring members could continue sharing best practices, asking questions, and staying aligned on emerging trends despite global disruption.

Far from pausing foundational work, the Council’s strategy and standards communities accelerated their efforts in the same period. In September 2020, they released the first TBM Taxonomy Industry Extensions, adapting the core model’s Solutions layer to include sector-specific services and products—from assembly-line operations in manufacturing to patient-care modules in healthcare, lending services in banking, and learning-management systems in education. These extensions demonstrated that, even under lockdown, practitioners could convene online, iterate standards collaboratively, and equip peers with frameworks tuned to their unique cost-model realities.

Building on that momentum, the Council’s Standards Committee delivered Taxonomy 4.0 in December 2020—all conceived, drafted, and ratified through fully remote working sessions spanning multiple time zones. The update preserved the core Cost Pool and Tower architecture while clarifying definitions, reorganizing service groupings, and pruning obsolete entries. This all-remote development cycle not only kept the discipline’s evolution on track but underscored the TBM Council’s resilience and unwavering commitment to serve its members through the most challenging of circumstances.

As the world emerged from the pandemic, the TBM Council faced the task of converting crisis-driven innovation into long-term growth.

V. Rebuilding Independence and Capacity (2021–2023)

The years following 2018 had seen a decline in staff dedicated solely to the Council’s mission; community engagement, standards development, and thought leadership became intermittent. As Todd Tucker later reflected, the Council had “lost its voice,” and without consistent publication, programming, or public leadership, its once‑strong role as the field’s central advocate diminished. “There were fewer formal projects and meetings—it felt like we were in stasis,” Ed Hayman observed, underscoring the erosion of momentum during that period. 

In early 2021, the TBM Council marked a turning point when Phil Armstrong, Global CIO of Great‑West Lifeco, was appointed Chair of the Board of Directors. Armstrong’s leadership came at a crucial moment, as organizations were emerging from the disruptions of the COVID‑19 pandemic and seeking frameworks to guide digital transformation and financial stewardship. While his appointment brought renewed visibility at the board level, the Council’s operational voice remained subdued.  Meanwhile, Alison Breeding joined Apptio as Chief Marketing Officer, and her sponsorship at the C‑suite level reaffirmed Apptio’s commitment to the Council’s nonprofit independence and enabled clearer separation between corporate demand generation and the Council’s discipline stewardship.

“Phil’s appointment brought much-needed clarity, and having Alison on our side was a game-changer for rebuilding operational autonomy,” reflected Eileen Wade.

In early 2021, Eileen Wade returned to helm the Council and immediately set about restoring its core capabilities. Drawing on her deep understanding of the Council’s founding mission, she rebuilt critical infrastructure: hiring full-time staff, reinstating member on-boarding and tracking, and overhauling event and training processes—including expanding the reach of initiatives like TBM Tuesday through strong marketing tactics. She also clarified the Council’s nonprofit identity, ensuring that its governance and activities remained distinct from Apptio’s commercial operations.

These efforts came at a time when many of the Council’s core systems and programs had languished. Wade’s actions marked a turning point in restoring the Council’s ability to operate independently and deliver value to its members. Her work didn’t go unnoticed. Suzanne Chartol observed of Wade: “She had the historical context and could make things work with very little.” This praise highlighted Wade’s ability to drive renewal even under constrained conditions, laying groundwork for a broader resurgence in the years ahead.

The year 2022 marked the ten-year anniversary of the Council’s formal incorporation, offering an occasion to reflect on its evolution from a fledgling community of practice to a global standards body. To commemorate the milestone, the Council hosted a formal celebration in Napa, California, reuniting key contributors from its first decade. The event was both a retrospective and a relaunch—an affirmation of the Council’s continued mission and a forum for previewing its renewed direction.

To coincide with this milestone, the Council released its first State of TBM benchmarking study, a maturity index that assessed organizational progress across the TBM taxonomy, transparency principles, and operating model. The report was authored by Council staff and drew heavily from member contributions. It was designed not only as a research product, but also as a mechanism to re-engage members and assert the Council’s role as a steward of discipline-wide insight. The publication established a foundation for what would become an annual cadence of research, benchmarking, and structured practitioner feedback.

Following the Council’s tenth anniversary, there was a renewed emphasis on content development and thought leadership. The TBM Council set out to be more prolific in its output, starting with its Strategy Communities—groups composed of experienced practitioners and domain leaders with deep knowledge of the TBM discipline.

These communities played a central role in advancing the Council’s intellectual agenda by producing original publications on emerging practices, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and the evolving responsibilities of technology leaders. Their work formed the backbone of the Council’s programming that year and helped establish a new tempo for content production in the years that followed. Each paper was featured in breakout sessions at the 2022 TBM Conference, where community members presented their findings and led peer discussions.

The resulting white papers included:

• Evolving Technology Planning and Funding Models for Business Agility
• Building a Path to Digital Success for the C-suite and Corporate Board
• Intersection of TBM & FinOps: Perspectives from Finance and Business Practitioners
• Re-imagining Work: Enabling Better Decision-Making for Greater Product Profitability and Increased Feature Velocity
• Evolving the CFO of IT Competency Model

To strengthen its presence beyond North America, the TBM Council established Regional Advisory Boards (RABs) in EMEA and APAC. These boards convened senior executives and regional leaders to help shape the Council’s priorities and align its programs with local market needs. Their formation marked a strategic step toward formalizing regional leadership and expanding the Council’s collaborative governance model. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for deeper member engagement and accelerated global adoption of the TBM discipline.

In late 2022, the TBM Council introduced a formal Partner Program to strengthen collaboration with consulting and technology firms that supported TBM practices. The program provided a structured mechanism for ecosystem engagement, allowing partners to align more closely with the Council’s mission, participate in content development, and contribute to standards-based guidance.

Early partner cohorts included firms already active in the TBM community, now given defined roles for contributing insights, supporting member adoption, and amplifying Council initiatives. The launch marked a strategic extension of the Council’s collaborative model, reinforcing its role as both a convener and steward of TBM-aligned expertise.

By 2023, the TBM Council had rebuilt sufficient capacity to reinvest in core functions, including standards development, practitioner research, and community engagement. Staffing levels continued to grow, restoring dedicated roles for each of these areas and enabling more ambitious projects. Eileen Wade departed the Council in mid-2023, but left behind the infrastructure and momentum necessary for sustained success.

A key focus for the year was expanding the TBM framework through the development of Connected Standards—guidance that clarified how TBM intersects with other major enterprise models. These efforts included mapping integrations with frameworks such as NIST Cyber-Security and ServiceNow’s Common Services Data Model (CSDM), offering practitioners a clearer picture of how TBM could operate within broader architectural and security contexts.

This work culminated in the release of Taxonomy 4.1 in late 2023, a major update that incorporated the NIST-aligned extension from the Connected Standards initiative and reflected the Council’s increased capacity for standards stewardship.

As 2023 came to a close, Ed Hayman recalled, “It was the first time in years that it felt like people were asking, ‘What’s next?’ instead of ‘What happened?’ That’s when you know a community’s alive again.” The TBM Council stood on firmer ground—operationally stable, programmatically vibrant, and increasingly global in reach. With foundational capacities restored and a new generation of practitioner content in motion, the stage was set for the next era of growth. The transition to 2024 would bring fresh leadership, expanded institutional partnerships, and a sharpened focus on the Council’s long-term vision for the discipline.

VI. Momentum and Modernization (2024–)

Building on the Council’s regained operational footing, 2024 saw a renewed emphasis on content development. With the capacity to hire additional staff focused on thought leadership, the TBM Council launched a fresh wave of practitioner-oriented publications. Strategy Communities delivered a series of eBooks that deepened guidance around evolving IT financial management challenges, while Council staff contributed new resources aimed at assessment, implementation, and organizational maturity.

Among the most significant contributions was the release of an updated TBM Maturity Assessment—a comprehensive benchmarking tool that expanded on a 2020 model initially designed for the U.S. Federal Government. This new version offered broader applicability across industries and geographies and helped organizations evaluate their TBM practice against best-in-class standards. Collectively, the 2024 publications helped establish a consistent and scalable publishing cadence that would anchor the Council’s knowledge agenda heading into 2025.

In the fall of 2024, the TBM Council appointed Matthew Guarini as Executive Director. A veteran technology analyst and former Group Vice President at Forrester Research, Guarini brought a long history of advising CIOs and business leaders navigating the intersection of technology, finance, and strategy. His arrival marked a continued effort to scale the Council’s programs, strengthen its institutional partnerships, and deepen its research capabilities.

As Executive Director, Guarini outlined a strategic agenda focused on modernizing the TBM discipline to reflect the realities of hybrid IT, cloud economics, and executive decision-making. His priorities included expanding visibility into ESG and AI modeling, broadening the discipline’s accessibility to C-level stakeholders, and reinforcing TBM’s role as a strategic operating model for digital enterprises. The Council began executing on this agenda in 2025, laying the groundwork for new standards, research initiatives, and practitioner tools aligned with these evolving priorities.

In June 2025, the TBM Council introduced its most comprehensive standards update in over a decade with the launch of TBM Framework 2.0 and Taxonomy 5.0—unveiled together at the TBM Summit EMEA in Amsterdam. These releases reflected years of learning, evolution, and feedback from the global TBM community, and signaled a major milestone in the discipline’s maturation.

Framework 2.0 represented the first major revision since the publication of Technology Business Management: The Four Value Conversations CIOs Must Have With Their Businesses. It codified the principles, practices, and maturity stages that had emerged over years of practitioner experience, offering a modern blueprint for running technology like a business in increasingly dynamic enterprise environments.

Taxonomy 5.0 delivered a parallel leap forward. It introduced enhanced support for hybrid cloud, SaaS, and AI modeling, expanding the taxonomy’s reach to reflect the architectural and financial realities facing modern IT organizations. Together, these standards formed the core of a refreshed, modular TBM architecture built for adaptability, insight, and integration.

In July 2025, the TBM Council began a major digital overhaul to increase accessibility and deepen engagement with its standards and guidance. For the first time in years, the Council’s website featured comprehensive sections on the TBM Framework and TBM Taxonomy—transforming the site into a practical destination for practitioners seeking to develop models, build roadmaps, or benchmark their practices.

This expansion included new resources tailored to the needs of different roles and maturity levels, including practitioner guides, templates, new training courses, and assessment tools. The effort reflected a broader shift in the Council’s strategy: from publishing standards to enabling their day-to-day application. It also laid the groundwork for ongoing digital content delivery aligned to the evolving needs of the TBM community.

Conclusion

From its founding in 2012 through its evolution across more than a decade, the TBM Council has grown from a fledgling alliance into a globally recognized nonprofit stewarding a vital management discipline. Across periods of rapid expansion and deliberate reinvention, the Council has remained committed to empowering technology and finance leaders with the tools, language, and standards needed to run technology as a business. Looking ahead, its focus is squarely on the future—evangelizing the principles of TBM, delivering high-impact technical content for practitioners, supporting the success of TBM programs in diverse enterprise environments, and evolving the discipline to meet the challenges of emerging technologies, operating models, and business demands. The Council’s journey continues, guided by the belief that transparency, agility, and value are essential to modern digital leadership.