What is TBM?

Technology Business Management (TBM) is a discipline that improves business outcomes by giving organizations a consistent way to translate technology investments to business value.

TBM Council board member Atticus Tysen of Intuit explains TBM and its critical role in the modern digital business.

Finance and technology leaders need comprehensive visibility, planning, billing, benchmarking, and optimization of their technology investments regardless of technology stack, delivery, or development model.

Finance

has ERP

HR

has HCM

Sales

has CRM

Marketing

has RPM

Tech Execs

have TBM

TBM defines the tools, processes, data, and people needed to manage the business of technology. Based on a standard taxonomy that can be used by technology, finance and business leaders, TBM enables organizations to react quickly to changing market dynamics, make data-driven decisions, and align organizations around a common business objective.

With TBM, technology leaders deliver impactful outcomes…

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

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  • Planning takes too long and is immediately out of date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 investments to business value

Organizations need a way to connect technology investments to business value. In other words, organizations need to consider how they can translate the things that money is spent on – cloud bills, data center investments, 3rd party software, and developers – to outcomes that the business cares about.

1

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.

2

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.

3

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.

4

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.

Allocating costs fairly according to use

To unlock TBM’s biggest benefits, organizations must master the art of allocating costs equitably according to each element’s use and dependence on other elements, and in a manner that’s defensible to those paying the costs. The first step is understanding how services are composed.

(Hover over diagram to pause)

1
2
3
4

Backed by a standardized taxonomy for technology costs

The complexity and variety of technology architectures mean that every business uses their own terminology or lingo to describe the elements in their purview. This makes it very difficult to adopt best practice allocation methodologies or make efficiency comparisons across industry. That is why in 2014, the TBM Council standardized on a TBM Taxonomy to help take the guesswork out of naming and organizing cost structures. The TBM Taxonomy translates from a financial view to a technology view to a business-facing view with terminology that makes sense to each audience.

The TBM Taxonomy makes adoption of TBM much easier, because it settles debates about what to call things or how to group costs together. It also lays the groundwork for vendors to standardize other important tools, such as the allocation model that defines the math for apportioning costs and reporting systems for quickly deriving insights about an organization’s spend.

Learn more about the TBM Taxonomy

“TBM is a game changer at Liberty Mutual. We are already seeing significant wins in migrating workloads to the cloud, data center consolidations, strategic sourcing, and rightsizing.”

Lawrence Kim
Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Technology

Leveraging TBM throughout the business operation lifecycle

TBM is not a static framework or activity that is performed a few times a year – it should be leveraged throughout a business operation lifecycle to guide strategic planning and ideation, demand and capacity management, financial planning, delivery management, and value management.

  • Review previous performance
  • Define business objectives
  • Review demand of both assets & workforce
  • Identify available resources
  • Budgeting & forecasting over different time horizons
  • Investment planning
  • Deploying products & services
  • Manage efficient use of resources (e.g. rightsizing)
  • Measure business value
  • Review KPIs & metrics
  • Manage & revise contracts & procurement

TBM brings visibility and data to each of these stages to help inform decisions. And it is this cycle that is accelerating today, driving the need for accurate information that is available at the speed of business.

Getting started with TBM

Most organizations start their TBM journey with an emphasis on technology costs and planning, typically focusing on traditional IT, public cloud, or agile development costs. As they mature, organizations use TBM to track app or services TCO, and translate the value of IT-as-service-provider to the organization. Eventually, leaders use TBM to connect technology investments to the business strategy and outcomes.

Check out our TBM Tuesdays video series for live and on-demand conversations about today’s hottest TBM topics and trends.

#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