This is the final part of this TBM Success series, we explore the financial view, the heartbeat of sustainable IT decision making. Technology Business Management (TBM) enables much more than cost recovery or showback. Done well, it gives the business clarity, predictability, and control over technology spend. But none of that happens without bringing Finance into the centre of the model.
Focus Keyphrase: TBM financial view
At its best, the TBM financial view connects strategy, consumption, and cost. It brings IT, business, and Finance into the same room and not just to agree on figures or reconcile differing labels for technology, but to understand what’s driving those numbers and how to respond. It’s often revealing to see how Finance describes IT services compared to how they’re actually structured and TBM helps bridge that language gap.
Making Finance Part of the Service Conversation
One of the key shifts TBM introduces is accountability. Costs are no longer just a Finance team’s concern, they become part of the day-to-day awareness of service owners and technologists. For instance, a storage architect who previously focused solely on technical performance, latency, redundancy, capacity, may now also consider the cost differential between on-prem and cloud storage. That’s because users increasingly see these services through a financial lens, per-terabyte costs, access speed tiers, and data egress charges. TBM gives technical teams the context to weigh architecture decisions against real-world cost impact. That awareness raises the bar. Technologists begin understanding how their work impacts cost trends, and Finance begins receiving more meaningful, business aligned feedback
Forecasting | From Static Budget to Dynamic Conversation
Forecasting with TBM moves beyond the annual spreadsheet exercise. Because TBM incorporates actuals, usage trends, and service-level insight, Finance teams can spot where demand is rising (e.g. increase in cloud database usage) and project those costs forward. For example, if support call volumes spike by 20% over three months, TBM data helps explain the cost increase and not just report it.
With this visibility, a six-month forecast becomes less guesswork and more narrative. Regular TBM reviews with business units (monthly or quarterly) then serve as live planning sessions, aligning investment with actual demand.
Investment Planning that Makes Sense
TBM doesn’t replace the business case, but it improves it. Let’s say you’re building a new eCommerce platform. Your project costs include developers, cloud hosting, and security infrastructure. TBM helps you calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO), factoring in not just vendor prices but also internal support, licence uplift, and even capacity needs.
This means when you pitch for investment, you’re not guessing, you’re presenting a data-backed, full picture. And when capacity must be added (example, storage expansion to support new transactions), TBM helps prove it’s not optional, it’s critical to avoid throttling business capability.
Creating an Internal IT Market
A mature TBM model enables chargeback or showback and this may be a stage you aim for later, but this isn’t about making profit, it’s about visibility. If HR sees they’re spending $200,000 annually on document storage, they can explore if usage is justified or if archiving policies should change. It changes the conversation from IT is expensive to here’s how we can optimise. TBM lets business users understand cost per unit of service, a gigabyte of storage, a helpdesk ticket, or an application instance and influence cost by influencing demand.
When Unit Cost Becomes a Metric of Success
One of the most powerful outcomes of a fully realised TBM model is the ability to track unit cost. If you reduce the per-ticket cost of support by automating password resets, that’s measurable. If your cloud costs per transaction drop due to right sizing, that’s demonstrable value. And when those savings are transparent, they build trust and invite reinvestment into services that matter
Start Small. Expand with Intent.
If there’s one practical lesson I’ve learned over TBM implementations, it’s this, avoid the big bang. On paper, it’s tempting to model everything from day one, but in practice, it’s rarely achievable. Once you start lifting the bonnet, you quickly discover missing data, loosely defined services, or unclear cost ownership. Many organisations are more fragmented than they realise.
TBM maturity doesn’t come from going wide quickly, it comes from going deep where it counts, building credibility, and using that momentum to scale. Start with a single function or a focused area of spend. Build a clean, understandable model. Use that to guide broader engagement. It’s far more effective than trying to boil the ocean.
What’s Next | Preparing for TBM Implementation
This post wraps up the four part series on what TBM success looks like.
- Part 1: The Business View – Why TBM must start with alignment to business outcomes
- Part 2: Financial and Strategic Decisions – How TBM influences portfolio and investment planning
- Part 3: The Technology View – Why service modelling and architecture matter
- [Part 4: The Financial View] – How Finance and TBM align to create cost transparency and influence
In upcoming posts, I’ll shift focus to preparing for TBM implementation. We’ll explore how to set a realistic scope, secure sponsorship, and align expectations across Finance, IT, and the business. Whether you’re starting with a spreadsheet or aiming for a fully integrated cost model, the goal is the same, to build something trusted, structured, and scalable.