2022 TBM Council Award Winner:

Business Optimization

Investment Transparency with TBM Leads to Optimized Spend at National Grid

 

Executive Summary

Technology Business Management (TBM) enables National Grid to achieve myriad savings by leveraging external benchmarks with their TBM Apptio solution. As part of an ambitious savings program targeting $100M+ (USD) in savings over three years, the National Grid team is leveraging TBM principles and Apptio solutions to benchmark IT Tower costs and initiate approximately 130 optimizations externally. Through these efforts the National Grid TBM team exceeded their first-year target by delivering $47M (USD) in annual savings.

National Grid is one of the world’s largest publicly listed utilities focused on the transmission and distribution of electricity and gas across the United Kingdom and the United States East Coast. National Grid is vital in connecting millions of people to the energy they use safely, reliably, and efficiently.

The Challenge

National Grid is undergoing a major multi-year transformation within its Digital & Technology organization to achieve its ambitious goal of delivering a more affordable and reliable clean energy future. This transformation comes with a myriad of pressures to reduce IT costs to increase customer value, change their ways of working, and meet regulatory reporting and funding requirements. Additionally, National Grid’s acquisition and divestiture activity across the United States and the United Kingdom has added to the pressures related to delivering these cost savings.

Establishing the Solution

National Grid established a TBM office in 2018 as a critical enabler for ensuring the successful delivery of the transformation’s targeted outcomes. Additionally, National Grid invested in ApptioOne Plus, ApptioOne Benchmarking, Vendor Insights, and Premier Support. As part of a three-year savings program, this investment helps National Grid rationalize applications, optimize network cost, optimize cloud spend, and reduce technical debt.

The Result

Achieving $47M in Annual Savings

As part of an ambitious savings program targeting (USD) in savings over three years, National Grid’s TBM office is leveraging ApptioOne to identify and achieve significant savings in four key initiatives:

  1. Application rationalization
  2. Network cost optimization
  3. Cloud cost optimization
  4. Technical debt

 

Application Rationalization: Using Application TCO reporting to rationalize applications, National Grid is targeting approximately 400 applications for efficiency or decommissioning. With those efforts, the TBM team is on track to save $10M over three years. In FY22, they achieved $2M in efficiency savings and reduced their total cost per application.

Network Cost Optimization: Furthermore, TBM principles and ApptioOne allowed the team to develop a use case to identify suspected excess circuit billing by their Enterprise Network Carrier. Using site-focused reporting of network costs, the team identified historical double billing across numerous sites for both WAN and SD-WAN circuits. This resulted in a $1M credit.

Cloud Cost Optimization: By integrating Microsoft Azure into Cloud Business Management, the National Grid TBM team was able to right size, exposing reserved instance optimization opportunities. This has initiated a $3M savings for the broader program.

Technical Debt: Targeting technical debt, the National Grid TBM team developed a use case to expose the incremental cost paid to their Enterprise Data Center hosting provider for end-of-life server platforms. The annualized savings targeting technical debt equates to $1M.

Changing Conversations with Real Consumption and Transparency

Recognizing the need for more actionable and transparent cost conversations between the business and IT, the National Grid team enhanced their approach to TBM and the Apptio technology financial management solutions to focus on providing clear value and capability outcomes derived from highly accurate and actionable cost data. TBM principles align with the overall system. IT consumption drives the allocation engine and produces an accurate run rate.

Providing transparency to the underlying products and services IT procures enabled the National Grid TBM team to develop a truly consumption-driven allocation model. In conjunction with a comprehensive, actionable, and fully drillable “Bill of IT,” the National Grid TBM team has completely changed the conversation between their CIOs, regulatory teams, corporate finance, and other vital stakeholders to fact-based and results-driven discussions.

Building Use Cases and Embedding TBM into Major Initiatives

Beyond the 3-year savings program, National Grid’s TBM office is leveraging Apptio solutions to support other company objectives. With a use-case approach, the National Grid team starts with major organizational initiatives and identifies where TBM data can expose new opportunities or provide further layers of understanding. The TBM team supports extensive divestiture activities and activity to right-size application maintenance support models through this approach.

National Grid has four external Application Maintenance Managed Service Providers who invoice on a per-application basis and by service tier (e.g., Gold/Silver/Bronze). Their new platform exposes and augments this data with support tickets and support model information (e.g., 24×7, 24×5). With this newly compiled information, the TBM team developed a use case to uncover opportunities for re-tiering service levels, right-sizing support models, and providing signals for volume discount opportunities. With the execution of the initiative, National Grid reduced its application support spend by $3M.

Another area where TBM is driving efficiencies for National Grid is its divestiture activity. National Grid is currently divesting two large businesses. The TBM team has been leveraging ApptioOne as the single source of truth for understanding their Transition Service Agreements (TSAs) and the primary source for identifying stranded costs. the identification of approximately $40M in stranded costs.

Conclusion

As a winner of the 2022 TBM Council’s Business Optimization Award, the National Grid TBM team provided advice for earlier-stage TBM practices.

Sunil Anand, Global Head of Technology Business Management at National Grid, highlighted, “It started with us leveraging the TBM taxonomy to assess our cost base for benchmarking against our peer group.” From there, Sunil offers five tips for achieving success with TBM:

  1. Ensure your TBM program has full executive sponsorship
  2. Ensure accuracy and actionability of developed capabilities
  3. Establish a strong partnership between Finance and Technology
  4. Deliver continuous value through an agile delivery approach
  5. Architect TBM around clear use cases that deliver tangible outcomes

 

Establishing these points as foundational in a TBM program will ensure organizations deliver on their business objectives.

To become a TBM Council member, please apply. If you would like more information about the TBM Council Awards, or this story, please contact us.

Founded:
1990
Employees:
23,683 (based on 2021 YE )
Headquarters:
London, United Kingdom
Revenue:
$20.8B (based on 2022 YE accounts)
Industry:
Utilities
TBM Solutions:
  • ApptioOne Plus™
  • ApptioOne Benchmarking™
  • Vendor Insights™
  • Cloud Business Management™
TBM Benefits:
  • Saved $47M annually in first year
  • Launched 130 cost optimization initiatives
  • Application TCO uncovered approximately 400 applications for efficiency or decommissioning
  • $2M in efficiency savings and reduced the total cost per application
  • $3M savings in application support spend

It started with us leveraging the TBM taxonomy to assess our cost base for benchmarking against our peer group.

Business Optimization

The winner in this category has driven meaningful efficiencies in delivering technology to the business and/or in helping the business be more efficient through the use of technology. The winner uses the facts, tools, and processes of TBM to improve unit costs, find, and reduce waste, consolidate or rationalize technologies, automate labor-intensive processes, or drive other meaningful improvements in value for the money spent.

2022 Finalists:

  • Citizens Bank, N.A.
  • National Grid Plc
  • Origin Energy
  • Wells Fargo
  • Bank of Ireland

#RideTheWave

San Diego, California
November 4 – 6, 2024

Red Hat built the world’s largest enterprise open-source software company, growing into a multi-billion-dollar firm before being acquired by IBM Corp. This open-source heritage often placed the value of technology in the product and engineering realm rather than with IT. Thus, not surprisingly, Red Hat’s TBM journey started with a new CFO wanting to know why IT costs were so high. Through the TBM framework and discipline, Red Hat IT successfully delivered cost transparency of all IT spend and then became a model for technology spend planning and forecasting. The IT team added the FinOps discipline to its capabilities and is now managing a broad hybrid cloud portfolio. However, TBM and FinOps have remained in the realm of IT only, until now. Red Hat’s current CIO, Jim Palermo, is driving TBM, FinOps, and Enterprise Agile Management across the company based on IT’s success and through the lens of value stream management. in this session, Jim will walk through Red Hat’s TBM journey and its current transformation to an operational business architecture framework built on value streams aligned to business outcomes.


Speaker:

  • Jim Palermo, VP, CIO, Red Hat

When the team at Tenet Healthcare made the decision to move towards a model that provided more accurate financial transparency, they looked to TBM practices and solutions. Join Paola Arbour, EVP and CIO at Tenet healthcare as she answers the question “why TBM?”, including what Tenet was trying to solve with the TBM Taxonomy, the effectiveness of their KPIs, and how building support and momentum across the entire company was critical to their successful TBM adoption. In this session, Paola will also share how Tenet continues to evolve their use of TBM, including for mergers, acquisitions, and divestiture activity, as well as segmenting cost structures.


Speaker:

  • Paola Arbour, EVP & CIO, Tenet Healthcare

Data driven decision making has been a key to longevity and delivering best in class service to State Farm’s customers over the past 100 years. Recently, State Farm decided to use a managed services company for the day-to-day support of their Infrastructure Services. Today’s technology leaders need to be able to make real-time, informed decisions to help ensure technology investments are meeting their customer’s needs, while continuing to support company long-term goals. Ashley Pettit, SVP & CIO at State Farm, will be joined by Randy McBeath, Enterprise Technology Executive, and Andy Moore, Technology Director, and together they will share how TBM aided in State Farm’s analysis and decision to move to a managed service provider.


Speakers:

  • Ashley Pettit, SVP & CIO, State Farm Insurance
  • Andy Moore, Technology Director, State Farm Insurance
  • Randy McBeath, Enterprise Technology Executive, State Farm Insurance

There is fast evolution occurring in the overall technology spend and value management market, with the advancements of cloud, Kubernetes, AI/ML, and other innovations. At the same time, we are seeing vast changes in the roles of the CIO, CFO, and business/digital leadership. In addition, TBM is intersecting with other disciplines and frameworks, such as Cloud FinOps, Agile engineering, and portfolio resource management. How is this affecting the TBM discipline, the TBM Council, and Apptio? For one, TBM is moving down market, becoming more accessible to all sizes and maturity of organizations, with easier ways to get started and a faster time to value. Cloud FinOps, meanwhile, is advancing and adding capabilities previously in TBM to the cloud cost management space. Join Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta as he explores the evolving TBM landscape and how he believes it will bring even greater opportunity and value to organizations worldwide.


Speaker:

  • Sunny Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO, Apptio

In today’s challenging economic times it is critical that CFOs, CIOs, and CTOs speak the same language when it comes to the value of technology spend. Having a single source of truth that everyone can feel confident in, track progress continuously throughout the year with shared insights, and analyzing options for resourcing and funding in order to reduce waste is where TBM deepens their partnership. In this discussion, join members of the TBM Council Board of Directors as they discuss the pivotal conversations and steps taken to collectively adopt TBM practices across the organization, including responding to naysayers and gaining allies.


Panelists:

  • George Maddaloni, EVP, CTO, Operations, Mastercard
  • Laura Walsh, CIO, Smithfield Foods
  • RJ Hazra, SVP & CFO, Technology & Security, Equifax
  • Moderated by Chad Doiran, Managing Director, Tech. Strategy & Advisory, Accenture

Fumbi Chima has led technology teams across multiple organizations throughout her esteemed career, including retail, manufacturing, media, and financial services. As a turnaround and high growth leader, Fumbi has leveraged TBM as a foundational practice to bring repeatable processes, purchasing guidelines, and cost/resource savings. Now at Boeing Employe Credit Union (BECU) serving more than 1.2 million members, Fumbi is driving their digital transformation with a clear vision and strategy to optimize their public-cloud with TBM and Cloud-FinOps, adopt a product model, and set the groundwork for future innovation and growth. Join Fumbi and Larry Blasko, President, Field Operations at Apptio, as they discuss the lessons Fumbi has learned along her TBM journey, and where this transformation leader sees the evolution of TBM taking the Technology industry.


Speakers:

  • Fumbi Chima, Chief Technology & Transformation Officer, BECU
  • Larry Blasko, President, Field Operations, Apptio

Technology leaders have a unique opportunity to transform their organizations into environmental champions with sustainable business practices. In this session, Neal Ramasamy, CIO at Cognizant and Phil Alfano, Field CTO at Apptio will share how TBM can be leveraged to achieve comprehensive visibility into real-time data-driven tracking to ensure company goals and actions are being met to achieve a sustainable future.


Speakers:

  • Neal Ramasamy, CIO, Cognizant
  • Phil Alfano, Field CTO, Apptio

For McGraw Hill, having a transparent framework that drives smart investment strategies and a common language across this 135-year-old company is critical. Known as one of the “big three” education publishers, McGraw Hill must stay ahead of their competitors with innovation and value delivery. Join Yuliya Oberman, Finance Director for McGraw Hill Education and Eileen Wade, General Manager of the TBM Council as they discuss how TBM is essential to McGraw Hill’s enterprise resource strategies and digital transformation journey.


Speakers:

  • Yuliya Oberman, Finance Director, McGraw Hill Education
  • Eileen Wade, General Manager, TBM Council

In this fireside chat, Matt Yanchyshyn, GM, AWS Marketplace & Partner Engineer at AWS will join incoming General Manager of the TBM Council, Jack Bischof, for a discussion on best practices for building successful TBM practices focused on cloud financial management. Including a deep dive into the nuances, learnings, and milestones that the world’s 9th largest insurance company is achieving on their Cloud FinOps journey.


Speakers:

  • Matt Yanchyshyn, GM, AWS Marketplace & Partner Engineering, AWS
  • Jack Bischof, Incoming General Manager, TBM Council

Hear from Ajay Patel, COO at Apptio and Zubin Irani, CEO at Cprime as they discuss how the intersection of TBM and enterprise agile planning is a critical strategy for organizations to adopt if they want to drive business growth more efficiently, in real-time, and keep up with the speed of change that today’s organizations face.


Speakers:

  • Ajay Patel, COO, Apptio
  • Zubin Irani, CEO, Cprime

Join Origin Energy’s Adrian Thivy, GM, Enterprise Technology Services, as he shares how TBM is creating complete confidence in their spend-to-value ratios across IT and the broader company, allowing a rapid response to the market forces driving significant pressure on the “cost to serve” customers. A finalist for the 2022 TBM Council Award for TBM Pacesetter, hear how their TBM practice was built in record time, including lessons learned as they developed business capabilities and managed a significant cloud migration and transformation.  

Session topics will include:  

  • Establishing a clear purpose and common goals that drive cross-functional understanding
  • Utilizing an adaptative governance framework to ensure accountability across all stakeholders 
  • Leveraging TBM and ServiceNow CSDM to deliver a transparent, flexible, and sustainable model in a shorter time frame
  • How bespoke logic has dramatically improved transparency of cost more than 90%


Presented by:

  • Adrian Thivy, GM, Enterprise Technology Services, Origin Energy 

Many organizations aspire for a cloud-native posture, however few have the time, resources and budget to transform into 100% public cloud operations. Equifax has broken through those barriers to modernize its infrastructure globally — driving faster innovation for customers, more business agility, and stronger cybersecurity. Hear from Manav Doshi, GM, Technology Solutions on how the Equifax team is rebuilding a century-old company, with a real-time approach to optimizing cost and revenue growth in the cloud.

 

Presented by:

  • Manav Doshi, GM, Technology Solutions, Equifax 

Transport for NSW is the winner of the 2022 TBM Council Award for TBM Pacesetter, which recognizes significant progress and value with TBM in a relatively short period of time. In this session, hear how the merger of Roads and Maritime Services (RMS) and Transport for New South Wales resulted in the fastest consolidation of TBM data, models, and reports into a single TBM practice. Hear from Poonam Kataria, Sr. Manager of TBM, as she shares how TBM is driving Transport’s three key strategic outcomes: connecting a customer’s whole life; successful places for communities; and enabling economic activity.

Session topics will include: 

  • Utilizing the TBM Taxonomy to align M&A practices and drive behavioural change 
  • How the right level of support sets the right culture and TBM processes
  • Driving change in the organization based on data-driven facts

Presented by: 

  • Poonam Kataria, Sr. Manager, TBM, Transport for NSW 

Discuss how TBM supports visibility of investments across the enterprise to support setting best practices and standards for managing the impact of environmental, societal, and governance strategies by IT departments and organizations.

The TBM Council Standards Committee has built out TBM integration models with other IT disciplines, including Enterprise Agile and Product Thinking, as well as ServiceNow CSDM. Current findings will be shared to drive group discussion, experience, and feedback. 

Public cloud strategies are often embraced for the promise of rapid scalability, on-demand agility, and best-in-class security, resiliency, and features. However, public cloud adoption presents significant financial challenges that, when not addressed, inhibit any firm’s ability to exploit the promises of public cloud.  

To address these challenges, customers need to simultaneously resolve current inefficiencies and build capability to ensure avoidance of waste in the long term.  

In this session we discuss a detailed framework combining TBM-Cloud with FinOps, allowing customers to understand how to implement a program to overcome these challenges and financially succeed in the cloud. 

Session discussion topics include: 

  • A detailed view of the activities required to implement a TBM-Cloud with FinOps Journey 
  • Detail the flow of information required for each task 
  • Provide guidance on which activities should be performed when

 

Presented by:

  • Nathan Besh, TBM-Cloud Evangelist, TBM Council 

Project to Product Transition

Outcome-focused development via agile transformation

For organizations looking to transition from projects to products, TBM can help organize resources and outcomes into value streams – the specific sets of activities that align to business outcomes.

Accelerating Cloud Adoption

Drive measurable outcomes with your cloud strategy

For organizations trying to accelerate their cloud journey, TBM provides a way to map a plan and measure the outcomes from cloud migration to cloud cost management to cloud optimization.

Morning Sessions

A look back at 10 years of TBM leadership and community building.


Speaker:

  • Ashley Pettit, SVP & CIO, State Farm Insurance

Introduced more than 10 years ago, Technology Business Management (TBM) was born out of the need for CIOs to have a management system to drive their technology operating strategy. At its core, the TBM discipline gives visibility into technology spend to provide common ground and enable a collaborative partnership across teams for prioritizing resources and achieving business outcomes. In this session, the TBM Council Standards Committee Chair, Atticus Tyson will share how over the past few years TBM has evolved to ensure leaders are able to accelerate digital initiatives, embrace the cloud, and communicate today’s complex technology landscape. TBM enables organizations to frequently and quickly evaluate projects, platforms, and investments to address the needs of the modern enterprise.


Speaker:

  • Atticus Tysen, SVP Product Development, Chief Information Security & Fraud Prevention Officer, Intuit

Atticus Tyson and Phil Alfano will guide the group through an executive discussion to capture “What is digital success to you?”. Is it how your organization creates new business capabilities? The elimination of legacy processes and systems? Funding innovation? Or all of the above as long as it drives an improved customer experience? Discuss with your table mates, as an overall group, and capture learnings and takeaways to bring back to your own team.


Speakers:

  • Atticus Tyson, SVP Product Development, Chief Information Security & Fraud Prevention Officer, Intuit
  • Phil Alfano, Field CTO, Apptio

How does a 170-year-old financial institution deliver a new, fully modernized technology strategy while supporting 24×7 service to their customers across a multitude of platforms, including point-of-sale, mobile, and web services? Mike Brady, Nicole Holmes, and Chad Schmidt will share how at Wells Fargo, they are creating a Technology Infrastructure team founded in the TBM discipline and responsible for aligning with internal partners to adopt an automation first approach for accelerating the delivery of services and deploying enhancements at speed. All while remaining compliant, secure, and agile.


Speakers:

  • Mike Brady, EVP, Technology Infrastructure, Wells Fargo
  • Nicole Holmes, EVP, CFO for Technology, Wells Fargo
  • Chad Schmidt, SVP, Technology Finance Modernization, Wells Fargo

It’s been two years since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic. To re-imagine employee and customer experiences, every company was forced to speed up their shift to digital from multi-year project plans to instead creating, executing, and delivering new business models in a matter of weeks. As we emerge from this crisis, we recognize this shift is not slowing down but exponentially increasing as businesses continue to respond to societal expectations of anytime, anywhere. In this session, Sunny Gupta will share how the companies best positioned to quickly respond to changing market conditions and hyper competition have a holistic view of their technology spend so they can be agile in their investment decisions, use the cloud as a competitive advantage, and align their resources to product delivery models and continuously measure value.


Speaker:

  • Sunny Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO, Apptio

Afternoon Sessions

Spinning up a cloud-native posture is a desired strategy for many organizations, however few have the time, resources, and budget to achieve 100% public cloud operations. In 2018, Equifax set a 5-year goal to achieve this, striving to provide their customers with faster innovation, more flexible business agility, and stronger cybersecurity. Hear from RJ Hazra, SVP & CFO, Technology on the lessons and successes the Equifax team has found along their journey, and what remains as they cross into their final year of their company-wide digital transformation.


Speaker:

  • RJ Hazra, SVP & CFO, Technology & Security, Equifax

The cloud is a significant shift in computing and companies need to get maximum value from it. FinOps is the evolving cloud financial management practice that empowers organizations to track and maximize cloud spend and enable tech, finance, and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions. In this talk, J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation will explore the intersection between TBM and the FinOps practice and the benefits achieved. Session discussion topics include: 

  • Creating a culture of ownership over cloud usage and spend
  • The most important challenges to tackle for delivering products faster while gaining financial control and predictability
  • FinOps organization structures in large and small organizations from the State of FinOps 2022 report

 


Speaker:

    • J.R. Storment, Executive Director, FinOps Foundation

In this engaging conversation, executive leaders will share both the challenges and best practices realized on their journey to embrace product-based innovation.

Session discussion topics include:

  • Achieving results as you shift from a projects-to-products innovation model
  • Maximizing CIO/CFO partnerships in this new paradigm
  • Building your innovation strategy around value streams, stable teams, and a high degree of customer centricity

Speakers:

  • John Wilson, VP, IT Costing & Performance Management, MetLife
  • Kaarina Bourquin, Director, Strategy & Portfolio Operations & Technology, The Standard
  • Moderated by Toyan Espeut, Chief Customer Officer, Apptio

Session abstract coming soon


Speakers:

    • Brendan Kinkade, VP, Build ISV, Technology & Hybrid Cloud, IBM
    • Moderated by Phil Alfano, Field CTO, Apptio Foundation

TBM empowers hundreds of decision makers with the facts they need to execute a digital strategy faster, without bias, and in alignment across business units. This includes technology consumers, service and application owners, LOB CIOs, enterprise PMOs, compliance leaders, budget coordinators, and many more. What are the fundamentals of developing and executing a successful TBM practice? In this session, experienced practitioners will share the lessons and foundations they’ve learned delivering business value for their organizations with TBM.

Session discussion topics include:

  • Fundamentals of proper support and sponsorship across key stakeholders
  • Demonstrating how and why TBM is core to strategy and a digital operating model
  • Developing, educating, and enabling your core team
  • Implementing or enhancing the necessary TBM processes

Speakers:

    • Jeri Koester, CIO, Marshfield Clinic Health System
    • Latrise Brissett, Managing Director, Global IT, Accenture
    • Leslie Scott, VP & CIO, IT Enterprise Services, Stanley Black & Decker
    • Moderated by Jason Byrd, Managing Director, Technology Strategy & Advisory, Accenture