Technology Business Management

The bottom part of the TBM layout represents the financial view of your technology spend broken down by the traditional categories such as Software, Hardware, Labor, etc and the functional groupings such as Infrastructure (Data Center, Compute, etc), Application, Delivery, and IT Management. This all represents an asset-based operating model that is good enough to provide basic understanding of IT cost visibility internally but does not provide enough value conversation with the majority of IT and business stakeholders.
 
 
 
 
 

Moving to the service and consumption-based level entails defining a service-based operating model where every IT solution delivered is viewed as a service. This ensures defining and costing out every service end-to-end including direct and indirect (internally allocated) costs. Imagine being able to report on your Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cost end-to-end. What makes this view powerful when consumption (operational) data is coupled with financial data to produce unit costs. For example, the monthly cost of your vCPU or GB of storage. This will drive a different level of value conversation with other service/app owners as they will be aware of what their total cost of ownership .

The top part of the TBM framework is what typically Businesses consume and interact with on-going basis. This is what shifts the conversation to the next level of services, products, and business capabilities they understand. When expressing the IT cost and budget in those terms, the value conversation and cost/budget optimization changes from “why it costs us what it costs” to “show us the financial impact of our growth or shrinking” or “show us how we can optimize based on our demand”.