What Is Technology Business Management?
Technology Business Management (TBM) is a strategic discipline for managing the value of technology across the enterprise. It equips organizations with a structured framework to connect technology resources to business outcomes—enabling better decisions, greater transparency, and proactive value realization.
TBM Council board member Atticus Tysen of Intuit explains TBM and its critical role in the modern digital business.
TBM isn’t just about managing cost—it’s about managing technology as a business asset. It brings together technology, finance, and business leaders with a common language, a shared model, and actionable insights to align investments with outcomes that matter: innovation, efficiency, resilience, and experience.
Just as other domains use dedicated systems—ERP for finance, HCM for HR, CRM for sales—TBM is the value framework for technology. It turns technology from a cost center into a source of measurable impact.
Just as other domains use dedicated systems—ERP for finance, HCM for HR, CRM for sales—TBM is the value framework for technology. It turns technology from a cost center into a source of measurable impact.
Why TBM Matters Now
As technology becomes central to how organizations compete, grow, and deliver experiences, the need to manage it as a value driver has never been more urgent. And yet, many leaders still lack the visibility, context, and shared language needed to make informed decisions.
TBM solves for this gap by turning data into decisions:
- From opaque spend to value transparency
- From delayed reporting to real-time optimization
- From disconnected teams to cross-functional alignment
Whether you're navigating cloud, AI, ESG, or product transformation—TBM enables technology to operate with clarity and intent.
Why is TBM needed?
The pace of technology
evolution is quickening…
Top 10% of companies evaluate opportunities and reallocate budget on a monthly to weekly basis.
...but Tech & Finance Leaders
suffer from fragmented visibility
into technology spend and
value of digital innovation.
Before TBM
With TBM
- Doubts about cloud migration plans
- Cloud sprawl and unplanned spiraling costs
- Duplicate SaaS vendors & wasted licenses
- Hard to direct funding to most valuable innovation
- Labor spend inertia on tasks instead of outcomes
- Lag in resource reallocation when priorities shift
- Too much “run” spend starves innovation budgets
- Spend views miss “fully loaded” costs like labor & facilities
- Business units consume tech like it’s free & unlimited
- Planning takes too long and is immediately out of date
Challenges
Tech spending is black-box
Existing systems are too slow
Decisions made on guestimates
Portfolio clutter
Connecting Technology to Business Value
TBM helps organizations bridge the gap between the resources they manage (people, cloud, software) and the outcomes they care about (KPIs, cost reduction, customer experience).
First we need to consider the practices and operating models that a company is adopting or wishes to adopt. These impact the business outcomes that matter to an organization. For example, a company that is adopting FinOps will care about unit economics. An organization that is moving to a product-oriented operating model will care about product TCO. How your business operates must be considered in building the map.
Organizations need to collect all the resources they have – both the technology assets and the people involved. People are typically a significant portion of an organization’s technology spend, so it’s important to include this in the framework.
Organizations need to map these resources to the actual solutions – these are the things that an organization builds or maintains. Depending on the chosen Operating Model, solutions may be standalone apps, services used by internal and external customers, or products.
The most important step is to connect these solutions to desired business outcomes. Without this last step, it remains challenging for business leaders to understand why technology investments are worthwhile. Tying them to business outcomes enables a shared understanding and common set of data from which to make decisions.
The TBM Framework: Turning Strategy into Action
The updated TBM Framework provides the foundation to plan, measure, and manage the value of technology. It supports both top-down alignment to strategic priorities and bottom-up modeling of costs, consumption, and outcomes. The Framework includes:
- Organizational Value Drivers – Cost, Risk, Experience, Innovation, and Sustainability
- TBM Outcomes – Transparency, Insights, Optimization, Benchmarking, Strategy, and Alignment
- TBM Foundations – Data, Tools, Methods, Roles, and Change Leadership
The Framework enables organizations to embed value thinking into every decision—from architecture and investment planning to daily operations. It’s not a tool—it’s a blueprint for managing technology’s business value at scale.
Financial management
- 3-5% budget optimization
- Decisions and insights real-time
Cloud transformation
- Make migration decisions 25% faster
- Optimize multi-cloud / SaaS by 30%
Digital innovation
- Cut capacity planning time by 80%
- Continuous product delivery at scale
The TBM Taxonomy: A Common Language for Technology Value
The TBM Taxonomy is a structured model that organizes technology spend, resources, and services across every layer of the enterprise. It enables clear cost modeling, service transparency, and value traceability.
With the TBM Taxonomy, organizations can:
- Map financial data to Cost Pools and Tech Resource Towers
- Align resources to Solutions that support the business
- Model value delivery to Business Functions, Value Streams, and Consumers
The Taxonomy makes it possible to speak the same language across technology, finance, and business teams—so decisions are grounded in facts and aligned to what matters most.
TBM Modeling: Connecting Inputs to Outcomes
One of the core capabilities of TBM is the ability to model how technology resources flow through the enterprise—from raw financial inputs to business value delivery. While this often begins with cost modeling, TBM supports a broader, evolving set of use cases that drive insight, fairness, and strategic alignment.
With TBM modeling, organizations can:
- Understand what resources are being used (e.g., servers, cloud, labor)
- Trace how those resources enable IT services and solutions
- Allocate technology investments to the business capabilities and outcomes they support
- Support showback, chargeback, optimization, and scenario planning with confidence
How It Works
- Start with total spend – Create a complete, categorized view of all technology costs.
- Map spend to resource towers – Group infrastructure, applications, labor, and services.
- Link to IT solutions – Assign costs to deliverables like Digital Workplace, CRM, or Data Platforms.
- Allocate to the business – Use drivers like usage, headcount, or consumption to connect to business value.
Allocating Costs with TBM
One of the most powerful capabilities of TBM is cost allocation—translating raw spend into meaningful views of technology usage, service delivery, and business impact.
With TBM, technology costs are no longer just ledger lines. They are mapped to:
- The resources used to deliver services (e.g., infrastructure, software, labor)
- The IT solutions and services provided to the business
- The capabilities and functions they enable
This creates a defensible, transparent view of spend—one that promotes fairness, enables chargeback/showback, and builds trust between IT and the business.
In this example, a hypothetical retail products company needs to understand the cost composition of their mobile ordering capability.
The Mobile Ordering business capability is comprised of elements from several different Solutions. In order to apportion costs equitably, the organization uses operational metrics to allocate the portion of the underpinning Solutions’ costs consumed by the Mobile Ordering capability.
In turn, each Solution is comprised of various technology and people Resources. Again, the organization uses operational metrics to allocate the portion of the underpinning Resources’ costs to Solutions according to their consumption.
Finally, each Resource incurs various types of Costs. The organization uses simple rules to allocate the incoming Costs to the Resources they support.
Connected Standards and Modeling Beyond Cost
Modern enterprises are under pressure to manage more than just cost — they must also consider risk, emissions, performance, and experience. TBM provides a modeling backbone that supports these broader dimensions of value, connecting financial data with technical metadata and business signals.
TBM by Design expands the purpose of modeling beyond cost allocation. It becomes a shared foundation for incorporating insights from other frameworks, standards, and governance processes. By enriching TBM models with attributes such as sustainability, compliance, security, and service ownership, organizations can create a unified view of technology’s contribution to value and risk.
Modern TBM practices go beyond traditional financial modeling to incorporate metadata and signals from systems and standards such as:
- CSDM (Common Service Data Model) for mapping services and ownership
- NIST and FAIR for cybersecurity risk and impact profiles
- FinOps for cloud financial operations
- Sustainable IT for ESG, emissions, and resource efficiency
- ITFM (IT Financial Management) for budgeting, forecasting, and planning — TBM elevates these core practices by applying the Taxonomy and Framework to drive more strategic, value-focused decisions
As organizations integrate these signals, TBM becomes not just a financial management function, but a system for holistic technology value management.
TBM by Design: The Next Evolution
TBM by Design represents the next phase of TBM maturity—where TBM is no longer an after-the-fact reporting function but a value management fabric embedded across the enterprise. It brings TBM into the architecture of how decisions are made, solutions are designed, and strategies are executed.
Rather than applying TBM in isolated pockets, TBM by Design is proactive, end-to-end, and organization-wide. It informs the planning of new solutions, the design of portfolios, and the governance of resources—ensuring that value is engineered from the beginning.
With TBM by Design, organizations:
- Integrate TBM into business and technology architecture reviews
- Plan up front how new solutions will be modeled, measured, and governed
- Strengthen TBM foundations (data, roles, tools, methods, and change leadership) to support a broader range of evolving use cases
- Shift from explaining past costs to shaping future value
Get started with TBM
Most organizations begin by using TBM for IT cost transparency—but the greatest value comes from expanding into broader business use cases:
- Agile labor and product modeling
- Cloud value management
- Application and vendor rationalization
- Strategic scenario planning and forecasting
Whether you’re just starting or ready to scale, TBM provides a proven path to manage technology with greater confidence, collaboration, and clarity.
