Mastercard uses TBM to put the customer front and center

Awards Category: Strategy & Planning

Summary: At Mastercard the strategy is simple: put the customer first. TBM is enabling IT to reorganize its operations around global programs so it can respond faster to changing market needs.

When most people think of Mastercard, they probably think of it as a credit card company. In reality, Mastercard is a technology company. More specifically, it operates a global payments network that enables commerce on a global scale.

“Think of us as a diversified, but integrated, products and services technology company that’s playing largely in the payments and payments-related-services space,” said Kush Saxena, Mastercard’s CTO. “So, what does that mean? What that means is we run a core technology product called our network.”

And not just any network. A network that moves trillions of dollars around the globe every year. To keep its millions of business and consumer customers happy, Mastercard provides layers of technology services and applications that, among other things, keep transactions safe, customer data confidential, and fraud in check. They also provide services like data analytics, fraud scoring, and identity management to their commercial customers.

This confluence of product, services, and network is where Mastercard’s business and technology strategies intersect to drive the company forward.

“The way our CEO would articulate our corporate strategy would be to first grow the core, and that’s the network; second, to diversify customers and geographies, and that’s all of these services that we’ve built on top of that, which are also technology products; and third, to build new businesses,” said Saxena. “Both our network and our services are comprised of a series of integrated, linked technology assets that build or drive towards the diversified portfolio that we have. And this is where TBM comes in, because TBM is the methodology and approach we are using to make sure that our investments and our technology assets are inextricably linked to the value they are generating for our customers and the company.”

TBM (not just technology) is the innovation

To make this value a reality, Mastercard’s Operations & Technology (O&T) division has adopted a “program concept” for delivering core technology, services, and new products to the business. In the not too distant past, O&T had a project focus that supported the company’s products and services.

“In the past, we operated across business and IT with an organizational overlay, much like most IT shops do,” said Saxena. “And the ownership of value, which, in fact, transcends organizational lines did not happen. The view was, ‘If I’m a sales guy, I just sell stuff’, ‘If I’m a product person, I build new features and it’s O&T’s job to go run it.’

“With the creation of these programs, we have individual and distinct units of value creation that transcend organizational boundaries. And so a program is a unit of value creation for the company aligned with the corporate strategy that includes operation stakeholders, technology stakeholders, and product and business stakeholders.”

At Mastercard, a program team consists of resources from the product teams, development and engineering, operations and the business, and quality engineering — all sitting together (sometimes physically, sometimes virtually) and aligning the program to deliver business value. The goal is to keep the focus on the customer experience, not the project.

“Collectively, we don’t just own the new feature or functionality,” Saxena. “We also own how it runs, we own measures on sustainability, we own measures on resiliency, and that’s the ability to move away from an organizational operating model to a program, which is a cross-organizational value-driven operating model. It’s the big enabling shift for all of that.”

This is where TBM comes into play. Unlike the typical approach of analyzing IT budget spend, mandating concessions from vendors, or giving business unit money-saving tools, Mastercard uses TBM to create a map of their enterprise services framework. The company uses TBM taxonomy to include data from other technology processes, assets, and tools beyond cost, such as development initiatives, service tickets, personnel, and the configuration management database (CMDB).

This holistic approach to TBM enables program managers to conduct more valuable discussions with the business regarding development capacity, operational health, servicing, sales, and support.

“The powerful thing that I’ve learned through the TBM community is that a lot of people stop at the financial transparency piece, and they don’t try and incorporate it or tie it back to the corporate strategies or to the overall technology processes,” said Mary Griffin, Mastercard’s senior vice president of Technology Data Management.

“Mastercard has gone beyond the standard principles of TBM, because we’re taking it to a different level. We’re using this program concept to communicate the value of O&T to the rest of the company and to show that we are not a cost center; we have assets and these assets are powering the overall corporate strategy.”

Using TBM to become more Agile

Although Mastercard’s technology teams and processes are Agile, some of their previous financial practices were not. For example, the way they capitalized software development costs impeded the technology teams from fully adopting Agile.

“What we’ve done is focus on the team costs,” said Steven Schmidt, Mastercard’s vice president of IT Finance. “We know what the teams work on and we can cost out initiatives that way, following standard software capitalization accounting principles. We did it primarily based on the cost of a Scrum team. So we can take the “cost of a team” and allocate it appropriately without hours. That was the innovator for us, ‘How do you do it without hours?’ And we do it, basically, through close coordination with the teams that work on those initiatives.”

Finance processes are still GAAP aligned, but now the finance team uses capacity-based metrics other than hours to estimate cost. “It wasn’t really actually that big of a deal once we came up with a way to eliminate hours,” said Griffin. “And, frankly, our auditors were open to it as well because other people are struggling with the same challenge: How do you move to Agile and still make people track hours? Those things just don’t really align very well.”

Without TBM, Saxena believes the move to Agile would not have worked because their main focus is the program, not a business unit or a project. Because of this, programs straddle the operational lines between different business units and IT. The goal of IT is to break down programs by services that are consumed across the enterprise. For this reason, programs also sit at the top of the TBM unified model, occupying the spot usually reserved for business functions like sales and customer service.

“So now that you’ve got teams where products and technology and operations stick together. To be truly Agile, you need to convert your big fat application into underlying services that are independently deployable and that takes money to do,” said Kush. “With the principles of TBM, a program team can justify that saying, ‘Look, over a three-year time horizon, I can improve the velocity for my program team dramatically if you will let me make the investment in doing that,’ And so this program structure, which came hand-in-hand with TBM, is creating the foundations for easier Agile migration down the road.”

Moving past cost to value

Like most companies that use TBM to get a handle on IT spending and, from that, begin to transform IT from an cost center to a provider of business value, Mastercard O&T is using TBM to go beyond costs, according to Griffin. They are combing cost transparency data with operational data to show the value their programs are delivering.

“What we’re doing is we’re taking [the TBM] framework and we’re putting it into many, many different tools within Operations & Technology so that we can show relationships between the operational data,” said Griffin. “It’s in our Workday personnel system. It relates to the call center calls that are coming in relating to the specific programs. In our CMDB, we are tagging the infrastructure back to those programs. So when you bring all that information together it becomes a much richer dialogue that we can have with our partners about the value that we’re delivering.”

It also gives the program managers new insights so they can make better decisions. “The trick,” said Schmidt, “is to marry those metrics with the right finances to come up with something that’s of value to the program owner.”

Making better decisions faster

And that’s really what this is all about: empowering decision makers with the right data so they can make better decisions faster. Mastercard’s adoption of TBM is not only changing how the business and O&T interact, it is helping them showcase the value IT brings to the table. But, more importantly, it is enhancing Mastercard’s ability to use technology in ways that are relevant to its customers.

“If you’re doing this right, you live and you breathe TBM and it becomes an integral part of your organization,” said Griffin. “It’s not this separate effort that you’re doing. It’s an embedded part of the way that IT lives.”

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