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one (IT and non-IT stake- holders alike) to mean the same thing and to include the same types of underly- ing costs calculated using the same methods.”
Transportation Depart- ment CIO Richard McKinney said those standards are vital to gaining the visibility into DOT spending that he needs to truly implement FITARA. They are also essential to making the case for change with real data rather than instinct and anecdotes.
“I’ve been frustrated since I came here three years ago with...my not having the ability to understand my unit cost,” McKinney told FCW. “When you get into trying to make a cost-savings argu- ment about shared services and consolidation, we lack the granularity...to make a good business case.”
Also included in the
report are 21 recommendations for implementing the taxonomy and broader TBM practices. The com- mission concluded that some minor adjustments to federal accounting and reporting standards are needed, and agencies have been urged to create dedicated TBM offices to wrangle the data and look for those efficiencies and savings.
The report also calls on OMB to “establish a governmentwide TBM governance board and designate a center of excellence for cross-agency implementations.”
At the July 21 event announcing the release of the report, General Services Administration CIO David Shive said GSA already has many of those rec-
Source:Technology Business Management Council
The TBM Taxonomy
The Federal Commission on IT Cost, Opportunity, Strategy andTransparency has called for a stan- dardized set of categories for expenses, applications and IT components.The members of the public/ private initiative argue that applying a consistent taxonomy will allow for more accurate performance metrics and better benchmarking.
AGENCY PROGRAMS, MISSION TEAMS OR BUSINESS UNITS
Each “customer” for IT services is mapped to the resources and expenses it consumes.
APPLICATIONS & SERVICES
End-user services
Agency application services
Shared application services
Delivery services
Platform services
Infrastructure services
IT TOWERS
Data center
Compute
Storage
Network
Output
End-user
Application
Delivery
Security & compliance
IT management
COST POOLS
Internal labor
External labor
Hardware
Software
Outside services
Facilities & power
Telecom
Other
ommendations in place and has been using some TBM practices for three to four years.
“We did a proof of concept and saw some real wins,” he said, but without the taxonomy and supporting systems in place, “it’s a ton of work. So we’re really excited to overlay the taxono- my...and to try to tell that story.”
The structure of a governmentwide group has yet to be determined, Shive said, but “the expectation is \[to\] do just that, to build a community of practice.”
Finally, the report includes more than 200 suggested metrics that agen- cies could use to parse IT spending once TBM tools are in place. Bench- marking across agencies and against
the private sector is a big part of TBM’s appeal for OMB, McKinney said, but both he and Shive stressed that the metrics’ real value is helping agencies make better business decisions.
“If done right, it’s a decision engine,” Shive said. “It allows you to flip levers on potential investments and say, ‘Make this investment, and here’s going to be the business out- come. Don’t make this investment, which is a decision in and of itself, and here’s what the outcome is going to be.’ Do that for every single invest- ment...and you start to sense trends and can make good forward-looking decisions.”
DOT, GSA and the Interior Depart- ment will test the newly developed
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