When we talk about TBM success, the conversation often drifts straight into tools, platforms, and data structures. But that misses the point. TBM should start where it matters most, the business, your business. Technology Business Management isn’t about dashboards or frameworks; it’s about how IT enables the organisation to achieve its outcomes. Whether that’s returning value to shareholders, growing revenue, or supporting public service delivery, TBM must demonstrate how IT contributes to the success of the business, builds accountability, and earns trust across the organisation.
The Business Perspective Matters Most
From a business point of view, TBM should create transparency and alignment. Executives don’t want cost models or tower breakdowns, they want to understand what IT is delivering, whether it’s working, how much it cost, and how it supports their goals. If TBM doesn’t translate into clearer conversations between IT and the business, it’s not working or you are doing something wrong.
Critically, the service catalogue should become the foundation of engagement, but in most organisations, it’s far from ready and, in some cases, extremely immature. Too often, catalogues are built from a technical viewpoint, filled with infrastructure layers, tooling references, and internal jargon, rather than clearly defined business services that stakeholders can recognise and relate to. This lack of clarity undermines trust, weakens alignment, and makes TBM outputs difficult for the business to act on or believe in.
Until the catalogue matures, a workaround is to identify a subset of known business-facing services and start mapping cost and performance there. Even if informal, this list becomes the bridge, a shared reference point for service reviews and portfolio planning. Over time, this seed model can grow into a full business-aligned catalogue, shaped by TBM conversations rather than waiting for perfection. Without this step, TBM becomes an internal exercise, very disconnected from what the business sees as value.
Service Cost and Service Levels Are the Real Output
TBM success isn’t measured by the internal fidelity of your data. It’s measured by how well you can explain service cost and service performance to the business. Can a product owner or business partner understand what they’re paying for? Can they see how it’s performing? Can they compare it to alternatives?
If you don’t have an agreed service catalogue, these conversations get bogged down in argument. One side thinks of “CRM” as a platform, the other sees it as six sub-services and a licensing line. TBM brings value when it organises this ambiguity into something shared. The service catalogue is the anchor and service cost and service levels become the two metrics that matter.
From Cost Centre to Value Contributor
For years, IT has fought the perception of being a black hole for funding. TBM changes that by giving business leaders the ability to trace costs to purpose. Instead of seeing IT spend as a lump sum, they see it broken down by business capability, CRM, supply chain, digital sales, and they start to ask the right questions. Are we overinvesting? Is this cost growing in line with usage and head count? What can we, and whats the impact if we rationalise?
This shift from cost centre to value contributor is at the heart of TBM’s business case. When IT can show its services in business terms, with shared language and shared metrics, it changes the dynamic. You’re not just justifying spend, you’re shaping how the business invests.
Shaping the Right Conversations
One of the biggest signs that TBM is succeeding is better dialogue. Are product owners & business partners asking for data? Are business leaders using your insights to prepare their own budgets? <- This is a big one. Are service reviews becoming conversations instead of reporting rituals?
If the answer is yes, that’s success. TBM isn’t about monthly reports. It’s about building trust and trust is built through consistency, clarity, and responsiveness. If you’re in a room and no one understands the TBM slides, you’re not doing it right. If people argue about what the numbers mean instead of what they should do about them, the model isn’t helping.
Avoiding the Over-Engineering Trap
It’s tempting to build the most sophisticated model possible, multiple layers of allocation, precision mappings, dynamic calculations. But if no one can explain it in plain language, it’s not helping the business.
What I’ve found works best is a minimum viable model something good enough to be directionally accurate, transparent enough to explain, and flexible enough to adjust. You’ll improve it over time, but the goal is to get it into the hands of business users quickly, so they start engaging.
TBM maturity isn’t a checkbox — it’s a journey. And like any journey, it should reflect the maturity of the business relationship, not just the sophistication of the toolset.
This post is Part 1 of a four-part series exploring what TBM success really looks like. If you’re interested in the broader view, you can continue reading the other parts linked below.
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I’ve always struggled with how to get business units to actually care about the service catalogue. Even when we build one, it’s hard to get them to use it or see it as relevant. Any tips on how to get better engagement before it’s fully matured?
You’re definitely not alone. Most catalogues in their early stages are written in tech-heavy language and miss the business context entirely. That’s why they feel irrelevant to stakeholders.
What I’ve found helps is starting with a seed catalogue, just a short list of business-facing services described in plain terms. Can be in PowerPoint or Excel or alternatives. Even 8–10 well-named entries can become the backbone for early service reviews. From there, bring the business into the conversation by asking, What would you call this? or Does this reflect how you see the service?
Also, frame catalogue discussions around cost and performance things they already care about. When people realise the catalogue is the lens through which TBM delivers insight and accountability, they’re more inclined to engage. It’s not about perfection, it’s about creating a shared view they recognise.