“Recognizing finance leaders who drive an IT financial strategy that matches the new demands of the IT organization.”
Modern technology leaders are constantly faced with demands to produce more, faster and cheaper —near impossible expectations without exceptional financial guidance. The most successful IT finance leaders are able to create cost transparency and build a flexible IT cost structure that scales with business demands. The IT Financial Pioneer award recognizes CFOs of IT, VP of IT Finance and/or Technology Controllers who don’t simply account for IT spend, but drive an IT financial strategy and capability that matches the ever-changing demands of the IT organization. They can be championed as chief financial officers of the IT organization.
This year’s TBM Conference Selection Committee identified nominees for this award who demonstrated the following characteristics typical of the most successful IT Financial Pioneers:
- Translating cost data into meaningful perspectives for technology and business decision makers.
- Informing decision makers of cost, quality, capacity and consumption tradeoffs.
- Communicating costs to business partners in a way that helps shape business demand.
- Finding ways to “variablize” IT costs and enabling public and private cloud adoption.
- Collaborating with corporate financial officers on strategies to fund innovation and growth.
To qualify as an IT Financial Pioneer nominee, it is clear from the list above exceptional accomplishments have been made. The nominees for this award — The Clorox Company, CME Group, and Wells Fargo — have proven themselves in a substantial way and we are honored to recognize each of them.
The Award Finalists
The Clorox Company: As a multinational manufacturer and marketer of consumer and professional products, Clorox embarked on their TVM journey three years ago. They possessed a clear vision: increased financial accountability and improved financial visibility and cost transparency at every level of detail, from infrastructure RUs to application cost by business unit. Prior to TBM, Clorox faced budgeting and transparency issues. To fix the issue, Clorox established a TBM Office (TBMO) with dedicated resources to drive all of its financial packages, including: Budget, forecast, LRP (loan repayment program), variance analysis, projects and SOX compliance. The results were extensive. Clear insight into financials enabled IT to find ~10% percent of cost savings in IT budget, driving that money into innovation. As a follow-up, Clorox requested – and for the first time, received – innovation funds for IT. This money was used to fund innovation in mobile computing for the next generation of workers, and other IT projects.
CME Group: CME Group Inc. is one of the world’s largest options and futures exchanges. While they had been utilizing TBM methodologies for the past decade to create cost models, it had been doing so manually. However, when CME hit a period of expansion in the mid-2000s, spreadsheets were no longer effective. Couple that with the 2008 recession and a change was needed. And by 2009 CME began to look ahead, planning for growth. It focused on a set of core initiatives, including the re-implementation of cost modeling – enabled by TBM technology -- with a specific goal: Change customer behavior, which in turn impacts demand. Today, CME Group began utilizing TBM to determine their actions on profitability. The TBM group created a partnership with the business, implemented a message efficiency program that models order to trade ratios, created a consolidated view of product profitability, and more. Thanks to the metrics enabled by TBM, CME Group is now looking to implement a spatial computing language to change the way that complex, real-time, high volume computations are distributed across a global infrastructure.
Wells Fargo: Technology at Wells Fargo is increasingly becoming more and more relevant to how the company differentiates itself from its competitors. Following the recession, Wells Fargo set out to determine how it could more effectively manage and operationalize its business, including back office functions and they began by utilizing TBM to enable true costing and transparency to alleviate trust issues. Wells Fargo’s approach was layered. They developed an internal system that allowed the IT division to create and manage IT services, created a transparent IT Bill to the respective businesses that consume IT services, led extensive trainings to demonstrate capabilities, and more. Today, Wells Fargo’s data is cleaned up, costs are aligned and services identified; the IT division is able to identify the true driver of cost, resulting in business decisions around consumption and demand; business leaders can now influence IT costs and they are, in turn, better demand managers; and trusted IT cost trending analytics and IT benchmarking were provided to the C-Suite.
The TBM Awards were created to recognize IT and finance leaders for their forward thinking, creativity, and overall dedication to advancing TBM practices, we’re pleased to recognize the above group for doing just that.
The nominees selected for the IT Financial Pioneer Award are exceptional in unique and notable ways. All of the IT leaders showcased have had a remarkable impact on their organization and are well deserving of a TBM Award nomination.
Want to learn more? Check out the TBM Awards page here! Be sure to follow @TBMCouncil on Twitter and #TBMC14 to stay update on all conference announcements!
Access the TBM Conference registration page here and prepare to share best practices and TBM stories with IT leaders- Miami Beach doesn't know what it has coming in October!