“… The Stack joined Gfrerer to talk cost control, innovation, and Technology Business Management (TBM) — a set of standards and best practices to communicate the cost, quality, and value of IT investments.
IT spend opacity had been a big issue at VA. How did you tackle it and how did TBM translate at the coalface into a useful toolkit to do so?
It’s arguably ironic, although a good thing, that IT spend has met with this focus amid a proliferation of IT spending around Covid. I often think of the apocryphal Sir William Slim quote: ‘Gentlemen, we are out of money — it’s time to think.’ And I think the opposite can be the challenge when you’re awash in cash: how are you applying those finances? How are you getting the right levelised and prioritised investment and being a good steward of the taxpayer’s dollars? Because government agencies do not always have a P&L mindset…”
“A criticism – particularly of federal organisations/the public sector – has been that IT cost becomes a bit of a Black Box…
Thatt was one of the early challenges we had — and we were able to finally remedy that by using TBM.
We started by breaking it [IT spend] down by the portfolios in the case of the electronic medical records: to get better, more refined cost accounting. Because, as you might imagine, those costs are distributed across multiple pillars within the Office of Information and Technology: you have a security component, you have a development component, you have an acquisition component; there’s a personnel and a staffing component…”
“How much was cloud OpEx management an issue for you at VA?
A significant one.
The great thing about cloud though is because of the billing across storage, compute and the other aspects, we were able to do two things at the very least — again, all with the aid of Technology Business Management.
The VA has a enterprise cloud, which has two principal vendors: Azure, and AWS. Both of them, like any cloud service provider, are able to provide that real-time feed of cost and performance data. So the TBM model could ingest that, and it really allowed us to have near real-time (or certainly monthly) conversations around our obligation rates. Then correspondingly, it allowed us to take talk about shared services again…” Read the full article here.
Source: James Gfrerer: the former Federal gov’t CIO on TBM, and stewarding taxpayer’s dollars in complex IT environments – By Ed Targett, April 8, 2021. The Stack.
