We’ve gotten great feedback about the eBook, Technology Business Management: How Innovative Technology Leaders Apply Business Acumen to Drive Value, published by the Technology Business Management (TBM) Council. Many people have asked us for a more concise version that they can share with team members and colleagues. As a result, we’ve begun publishing downloadable management summaries for each chapter.
The first summary, available here, describes key concepts from chapter one, including the value equation of business technology and the lessons learned by innovative CIOs in adapting to powerful forces like cloud computing, consumerization, and business demand that outpaces supply. Indeed, these are the forces that have given rise to TBM.
Written for a diverse group of technology executives and managers, from CIOs and CTOs to service managers and tower owners, chapter one illuminates several important things. First, readers learn that TBM takes a value-based approach, in which the value delivered by a technology or service is framed in terms of:
1) its total cost, including all retained and soft costs; and
2) the quality of what we deliver—defined as all the attributes that contribute to the value delivered by it, including functionality, performance, capacity, availability, and security.
Second, readers see that, to maximize value, they need a decision-making framework for collaborating with business partners on cost, quality, and business outcomes. This is provided by the TBM Framework, a decision-making methodology that helps technology leaders and their business partners collaborate on optimizing how IT dollars are spent. Relying on transparency in cost, quality, and demand for technology services, the TBM Framework enables key stakeholders to “speak the same language” in determining the tradeoffs needed to optimize run-the-business spending and change-the-business investments.
Finally, readers discover the TBM Index, a tool delivered by the TBM Council and Apptio that benchmarks and assesses how technology leaders improve value by applying business acumen to decision making. Following the structure of the TBM Framework, the first-of-its-kind TBM Index employs an interactive survey found in the eBook and through the Council website.
In summarizing chapter one, our first management summary provides a high-level overview of TBM and its components. It’s a great tool for helping others get a basic understanding of TBM and the reasons for adopting it in their organizations. We encourage you to download and share this and subsequent summaries with your team and to use them as tools to help articulate your TBM strategy.