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standardization of the way that IT spend is categorized.”
The Office of Management and Bud- get’s embrace of TBM began in 2015, when Scott and former Deputy U.S. CIO Lisa Schlosser brought together a team of agency CIOs with private-sector exec- utives from the TBM Council to work on mapping the TBM framework to federal needs and other reporting requirements.
Those efforts led to a July 2016 report from the Federal Commission on IT Cost, Opportunity, Strategy and Trans-
parency that states that TBM could save the government as much as $5.8 billion over five years. Although several agen- cies had already adopted some of the general practices, the report argues that a governmentwide framework is need- ed to fully realize the benefits and help CIOs implement the Federal IT Acquisi- tion Reform Act.
OMB has urged agencies to focus on seven common categories of IT spend- ing in their Exhibit 300 documents and has published some TBM-inspired
capital planning and investment control guidance. But Graves said the goal is not to force any sort of rapid government- wide deployment of the framework.
“The documents that we put in the budget are to get people thinking,” she said. “It’s not that you need to imple- ment this overnight. We’ll meet the agen- cies where they are. But we’re going to start setting those standards and put- ting a directional mindset in play so that people understand what the value proposition is.” n
What is Technology Business Management?
Technology Business Management is a value-management framework instituted by CIOs, CTOs and other technology leaders. Founded on transparency of costs, consumption and performance, TBM gives technology leaders and their business partners the facts they need to collaborate on business-aligned decisions. Those decisions span supply and demand to enable the financial and performance trade-offs that are necessary to optimize
run-the-business spending and accelerate business change. The framework is backed by a community of CIOs, CTOs and other business leaders on the Technology Business Management Council.
To gain alignment between IT, finance and agency leaders, TBM provides a standard taxonomy to describe cost sources, technologies, IT resources
(IT towers), applications and services. The TBM taxonomy provides the ability
to compare technologies, towers
and services to peers and third-party options (e.g., public cloud). Just as businesses rely on generally accepted accounting principles to drive standard practices for financial reporting — and thus comparability between financial statements — the TBM taxonomy provides a generally accepted way of reporting IT costs and other metrics. A simple view of the TBM taxonomy is shown below.
Business units or business capabilities
Source: The TBM Council report “Accelerating the Mission: Recommendations for Optimizing Federal Technology Cost and Value in the Age of FITARA”
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