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Perspectives
Technology Business Management
Solutions for aligning people, process, and technology
Leaders often turn to technology for transparency and useful metrics about the business. But many organizations don’t have a full understanding of their own technology functions. Learn how our technology business management services help organizations reimagine technology—aligning business and IT strategies to drive value and reduce cost.
Realize the promise of technology
How can technology leaders deliver on their IT strategy and the performance of their technology function? Many organizations are turning to the discipline of technology business management (TBM). Yet not all TBM is created equal. Some define it as simply financial management for the technology function. Others apply the term to streamlining and efficiency. But TBM has evolved just as enterprise technology has evolved in the face of shifting tools, talent, and expectations.
Yesterday, organizations looked to technology for efficiency, reliability, and compliance. Today, they expect the function to create new value for both the business and the customer—not at arm’s length, but through direct engagement and outcomes.
The current situation: Technology at a crossroads
The technology function in many organizations is under siege:
- New technologies are emerging and evolving quickly, which is a source of power as well as a source of disruption.
- Talent pools are more varied and complex than former full-time equivalent (FTE) models. This offers flexibility, but it also adds to the management and planning challenge.
- Stakeholders expect more, which is the traditional reward for past achievement, the natural expectation in the wake of rising investments, and a source of ever-mounting pressure to perform.
Traditionally, organizations measured the value of technology in tangible terms such as cost, control, simplification, reliability, and compliance.
Now, technology is increasingly called on to answer more complex expectations such as agility, fluency, transparency, and experience. Organizations want technology not only to monitor and preserve value, but also to help create it.
This calls for a new approach to managing enterprise technology that’s responsive and aligns business and IT strategies.
Where’s the opportunity?
In this environment, we can show CEOs and CIOs how technology business management helps solve their challenges with IT cost reduction strategies, return on investment, and the ability to turn transparency into agility. It can also show technology leaders how TBM helps make their contributions more visible and comprehensible—and elevates their work to the center of organizational strategy.
This means technology business management potentially offers both enterprise and personal benefits: It can help leaders save money, redeploy resources more effectively, gain respect, and secure tenure.
- Dollars and cents. More visibility into where technology spend is going means more opportunity to eliminate waste, reallocate it to other technology needs, or apply it to other parts of the business.
- A seat at the table. Technology leaders have more to offer in strategy and enterprise decision making when they have a firmer grasp of their own operations. Both the people and the company can benefit when roles that were once order-takers can reemerge as trusted advisers.
- Clear decision making. The heart of technology’s value is the portfolio. When TBM illuminates the portfolio’s alignment to strategy, resource efficiency, adherence to finance goals, and risk status, the entire organization can benefit from faster, sharper decisions.
- Leadership stability. When effective leaders are able to measure their tenures in decades, it’s good for them and for the organization. TBM helps promote long-term leader stability by boosting effectiveness and intra-organization cooperation.
Many of the tools and approaches that make up TBM are connected to enterprise technology. But they aren’t direct technology solutions. It’s important to understand that TBM is a business solution, not a technology solution.
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Our value proposition
Deloitte’s technology business management services are a connected suite of solutions that goes beyond technology implementation. TBM draws on our breadth of capabilities to help organizations focus on people, process, and technology—in that order—to drive more value from technology and elevate it to a more central strategic role.
For more than 16 years, we’ve tailored TBM to companies’ business and IT cost reduction strategies. This has helped companies save or reallocate up to 30 percent of technology spend while also helping leaders make more agile and better informed business decisions.
How our technology business management services deliver
Deloitte technology business management is part tool kit, part mind-set, and greater than the sum of its parts. Because the challenges it addresses are complex, its function is complex as well. The inner-working of TBM combines six key competencies to address six interlocking areas of focus—that all come together to enhance command over technology and to deliver on the growing demands that organizations place on it. The physical digital loop that joins these competencies doesn’t have a first or last step; it’s integrated to create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
Why Deloitte technology business management excels
There are other providers who offer similar tools—and who call them “TBM.” Deloitte stands apart for the way we combine these disparate processes into a whole that makes sense. Deloitte TBM helps align an organization’s technology vision and its strategy vision.
Because Deloitte TBM looks at the human element and the big picture first, the technology changes that follow are aligned to the organization’s real needs, and the organization can realize value more quickly. This flow of work helps avoid lateral impacts and the unintended consequences of a technology-only approach.
Understanding the larger human and business environment where technology decisions have an impact is the differentiator that makes Deloitte TBM a category of one in an otherwise crowded market.
Other key differentiators include:
- Deloitte has done this in practice, not in theory, for 16 years with large-scale client organizations. Our teams have firsthand knowledge of the common pitfalls, the nuances, and the methods that turn theoretical goals into measurable results.
- Our track record includes technology cost savings of up to 30 percent.
- While others offer some of the same component services, Deloitte stands apart by delivering the entire TBM value loop end to end.
- It’s easy to sell a technology dashboard, but it’s harder to get the right information onto it—or to derive useful insights from it—much less to tie the metric outcomes back into real business improvement. Deloitte makes it real.
- Deloitte’s global experience gives it deep knowledge of every major business and industry type.
- Deloitte’s interdisciplinary experience means it knows how to bridge the missing link between technology and business strategy.
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How our Technology Business Management services deliver
Deloitte Technology Business Management is part tool kit, part mind-set, and greater than the sum of its parts. Because the challenges it addresses are complex, its function is complex as well. The innerworking of TBM combines six key competencies to address six interlocking areas of focus—that all come together to enhance command over technology and to deliver on the growing demands that organizations place on it. The physical digital loop that joins these competencies doesn’t have a first or last step; it’s integrated to create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
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