Technology Business Management (TBM ) - How to better align IT with the business

Although IT organization are becoming more productive and move towards a more service focus, feedback often comes still with a negative spin, expressed in questions such as: Why is IT so expensive?”, “Why are costs increasing?”, or “Shouldn’t we move to the cloud?

Often the reason for increasing IT costs are not caused by the “producer” but the “consumer”, as BU's exhibit unchecked demand and over-consuming I&O resources also because they don’t understand the cost impact – and how they actually can if nobody is able to explain those cost drivers in a clear language.

Fortunately, there’s a way to change BU behavior and position IT as a trusted business partner. It all starts with IT getting a grasp of their own business. But how to do this, and where to start? The answer is Technology Business Management (TBM), a discipline that outlines best practices for managing the business of IT.

Here are 6 tips in order to become a trusted partner of your business

1.      Establish a Continuous Understanding of Your IT Economics

2.      Use Actual Costs for an Accurate, Complete, & Defensible View

3.      Frame IT Costs in Business-Friendly Language

4.      Show BUs How Their Consumption Drives Costs

5.      Provide BUs with Choices to Impact Their IT Costs

6.      Leverage Automation to Incorporate TBM into Your Review Cadence

With TBM, IT leaders demonstrate command of their IT business with fast access to financial and resource data through multiple lenses – from project and vendor, to servers and storage, to service desk and security. These foundational IT costs are then translated into business costs as applications and services with the slices, dices, and detail about supporting resources to drive confidence and action. Finally, shared project, application, and service costs are mapped to each BU, along with levers they can pull such as consumption volumes, service quality, and variable costs. By replacing emotion about IT costs with facts in business language, TBM helps IT organizations transform their relationship with the rest of the business, from reactive cost center to proactive service provider

Apptio is the pioneer of Technology Business Management and the leading provider of SaaS applications for managing the business of IT. Hundreds of customers, including more than a third of the Fortune 100, choose Apptio as their business system of record for IT. With pre-defined IT domain knowledge, dozens of built-in reports, and pre-packaged service offerings that deliver concrete results in a predictable time, Apptio can help you launch your TBM journey and gain value within a matter of weeks.