Menu
2023 TBM Council Award Winner:
Judges Choice
The inaugural winner of this new award, established to recognize perseverance through adversity, went to UPS, who, through its strategic use of TBM navigated numerous external challenges while delivering transformative outcomes:
In 2023, the TBM Council introduced a new ‘Judge’s Choice Award’ to reward perseverance in the pursuit of transformation that transcends the existing categories awarded during the annual conference. While the business was still recovering from COVID restrictions and Chinese lockdowns that had an outsized effect on their business, the UPS organization lead through numerous challenges, including navigating a potential union work stoppage and the increased regularity of extreme weather events impacting operations but not impacting their ability to always deliver to their customers. Through all of this, UPS was able to closely integrate TBM and FinOps practices to drive value across the IT organization.
UPS has a long history of activity-based cost modeling. For over 25 years, the company has been charging back business units for services. Their processes were based on data in Microsoft Access databases, which were fed by Excel spreadsheets. This system became cumbersome as technology advanced and the organization evolved. Queries became obsolete. Staffing in the Technology Finance analytics department was a challenge — resources needed to understand a complex network of queries, macros, reports, and spreadsheets, and it took years for a new person to get up to speed. The model was not only complicated but also lacked supporting detail for defensible charges, providing little information to business unit leaders beyond an application acronym and a dollar amount. These limitations hampered Technology Finance’s ability to support the business with the speed and accuracy the company needed and ushered in the adoption of TBM.
UPS found that the TBM framework and Taxonomy could be easily applied to their existing model and that a TBM system could automate and enhance their home-grown solution. A TBM Advisory Group and Steering Committee are responsible for implementing TBM at UPS. The TBM Advisory Group is made up of the TBM Office, one senior director from each Solution Delivery Group (SDG), and all senior directors of the Technology Services SDG. The TBM Steering Committee is led by the Chief Digital Technology Officer. Each SDG president is also a member. Both groups meet monthly to review progress and to provide strategy and governance over the program.
Led by the TBM Office, UPS created an application service hierarchy using their Apptio-based TBM system. They established clear service offerings that the business consumed, removing technical jargon from the names, and grouped offerings into service categories that aligned to Executive Leadership Team (ELT) functions. Service categories were then mapped either to operations or to non-operations. Other mappings were added to track investment objectives (invest, migrate, tolerate, eliminate) as well as if the app was internal or customer-facing. This allowed all groups to speak the same language and gave business units a clear view of which functional areas were driving the technology investment and Run costs for their area.
The TBM Office now provides monthly updates to the TBM Steering Committee regarding strategy, governance, and OKR performance. Each SDG president also meets monthly with their direct reports. Because the information is considered so valuable to the groups, the TBM Office update is the second item on the agenda of these meetings, reporting on the TBM work that was done that month, what is next on the road map, and success stories.
Improved cost allocation leads to increased accuracy for application TCO: UPS’s TBM implementation and re-envisioned application service hierarchy has improved cost allocations for network, occupancy, databases, and middleware. These costs are now properly allocated to the applications and services that consume them — something that was difficult to do under the company’s previous process.
This has dramatically improved the accuracy of their application total cost of ownership (TCO). Application TCO (and the associated supporting details) are now being used to evaluate key decisions, such as replatforming, modernization, tech-debt remediation, and rightsizing opportunities, in addition to finding ways to reduce servers and storage. For example, leveraging TBM, the mainframe storage team worked with their largest application group to reduce storage consumption of the application by 85%, saving $840,000 on the company’s most recent storage upgrade.
Transparency drives better intercompany chargeback and investment mix: TBM provides detailed cost allocation and reporting in a language everyone at UPS understands. IT expenses are now better aligned with the business units that consume the services. This increased transparency has created more accurate intercompany chargeback and given business leaders better insight into their actual spend.
Investment mix is one of the most important measurements for UPS. Business results depend on making strategic investments and tracking return on investment (ROI). TBM enables UPS to track how much they spend on Run versus Grow projects and provides insight that helps them reduce Run costs so they can reinvest funds into Grow initiatives to drive more business value.
This capability of TBM is a key enabler of the company’s business strategy. As Bala Subramanian, UPS Chief Digital Technology Officer, often says, “Cannot cut your way to success; need to focus on value creation.”
TBM fosters public cloud accountability and advances FinOps practices: The company’s public cloud strategy is simple: target applications for the public cloud based on fit for purpose, architecture, and TCO. TBM enables UPS to leverage all available data, including estimated public cloud cost based on sizing, historical trend data, and on-premises costs based on TBM modeled rates. This gives teams key information when evaluating applications for public cloud.
TBM also allows the company to leverage anomaly detection, rightsizing, and reserved instance reporting from Cloudability as part of their TBM system to manage and optimize public cloud spend. This detailed insight is driving team accountability for cloud costs and helping UPS negotiate better contracts. For example, UPS leveraged historical trend reporting from Cloudability to save $11 million on a three-year contract with one vendor.
At UPS, TBM is helping all levels of leadership throughout the organization make better decisions for the business. Business units and functional leaders have a clear understanding of the technology spend they are driving. Corporate Finance has better visibility of technology costs and how they are managed. This is helping the company optimize costs — better yet, it is giving leaders the information they need to invest in strategic projects that will drive the company forward and increase shareholder value.
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.
All levels of leadership throughout our organization are learning to use our TBM solution and how it can help them make better decisions for our business.
CONTACT
11100 NE 8th St. Suite 600
Bellevue, WA
98004
PRIVACY & TERMS
Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Presented by:
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:
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:
Presented by:
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:
Presented by:
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.
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.
A look back at 10 years of TBM leadership and community building.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
Session abstract coming soon
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:
