TBM May Start in the Office of the CIO, but Adoption Takes Teamwork
If you are in the early stages of your Technology Business Management (TBM) program, this may feel familiar.
- You have the mandate from the CIO.
- You have the framework.
- You have the vision.
What you don’t have yet is alignment.
Finance is reluctant to change. Technology teams hesitate to expose data that might raise questions. Procurement wants leverage but lacks context.
And you are stuck waiting on stale inputs that, when they finally arrive, require hours of manual work to make them TBM-ready.
In theory, everyone agrees TBM is the right answer. In practice, you’re the one trying to make it real.
TBM doesn’t sputter on strategy. It stalls on trust, timing, and bandwidth.
Different teams. Different incentives. Different definitions of success.
And one TBM practitioner in the middle trying to connect it all.
Huddle Around the Challenges
For Finance:
- What are the most time-consuming aspects of your AP process?
- What do these labor-intensive activities take attention away from?
- What would an ideal solution to this challenge look like to you?
For Technology Owners:
- In a perfect world, what information could you have at your fingertips that would make your work easier?
- What reporting would streamline your budget approval process?
- If you could show other departments their consumption of any technology service in terms of dollars, which services would be your top priority?
For Procurement:
- How do you measure whether technology spend is aligned to contracts today?
- How do you confirm that pricing is not drifting from what was negotiated?
- If you had visibility into every billing or service issue with a vendor, how would you use that in future negotiations?
These are not TBM questions.
They are operational questions.
But the answers can move people off the defensive and into a mindset of mutual benefit.
What If There Were a TBM Starter Utility That Could Help Get the Chains Moving?
This is exactly the world AMI Strategies has been doing for 35 years. We’ve literally been around longer than PDFs 🙂
We’ve spent our careers inside complex technology, telecom, and utility spend environments where:
- Accuracy matters.
- Timing matters.
- Context matters.
- And trust in the numbers is non-negotiable.
That background is what led us to the TBM community.
And why we sometimes introduce ourselves with a little humor.
Meet AMI Power & Light Co.
A fictitious utility company with a very real job:
To take raw technology, telecom, and utility spend and convert it into clean, powerful business cases for TBM practitioners.
It’s a nod to our roots.
And a reminder that TBM works best when it runs like infrastructure.
- Always on.
- Always reconciled.
- Always trusted.
But be warned: We’re not a TBM platform.
We are the utility layer that automates the financial and operational heavy lifting around the spend side of TBM so you and your colleagues can focus on judgment, storytelling, and strategy. And we help fund that future with sustainable, provable savings.
A Team Approach to Solving Challenges
When TBM starts to look like infrastructure instead of a side project, adoption changes.
For Finance:
Automating AP and the invoice lifecycle reduces manual effort, improves close confidence, and eases the headcount crunch.
For IT Leaders & Technology Owners:
A centralized, always-current view of spend, inventory, services, and allocations becomes the foundation for a true Bill of IT. One that supports accurate showbacks and chargebacks to the business units consuming those services, and replaces one-off spreadsheets with defensible, service-based cost transparency.
For Procurement:
Invoices validated to contracts, with full dispute history and comparisons to current market rates, create leverage and confidence at the negotiating table.
Everyone gets something they already need.
TBM becomes the layer that connects it.
Run TBM Plays at the Speed of Finance
Nothing kills a drive’s momentum like reconciling after the fact.
Instead of building TBM views weeks or months after close, imagine running TBM in parallel with the ledger.
- Same invoices.
- Same timing.
- Same version of the truth.
Cost pools, towers, services, and allocations are produced as the books close, not later in spreadsheets.
- Finance sees control.
- IT sees clarity.
- Procurement sees leverage.
And you gain a foundation of trust.
Score Touchdowns Early to Build Credibility
Adoption accelerates when value shows up fast.
That is why we start with a Spend Health Check that surfaces:
- Misbilled taxes and surcharges
- Pricing drift and contract leakage
- Market rate gaps
- Overbilling and unused services
These are CFO-level findings.
- They give you proof.
- They create sponsors.
- They fund your roadmap.
Early wins create political capital.
Political capital turns a TBM program into an operating model.
Create TBM Champions
- Automating AP and invoice intake to alleviate the burden for Finance
- Providing additional layers of allocation for showback/chargeback flexibility
- Identifying any and all billing errors and service optimizations
- Creating fast, defensible savings
- Producing TBM-ready data in lockstep with the ledger
Not Against This Squad, Tech Spend....
David Sonenstein - Vice President of Product Strategy
AMI Strategies
With over 20 years in the industry, David helps orchestrate AMI’s vision for vendor hyperautomation. While contributing to AMI’s adoption of automation technologies, system integrations and technology frameworks, his research focuses on enterprise market and technology trends and where automation solutions can help organizations achieve their desired business outcomes. He currently serves on the executive board of the Enterprise Technology Management Association (ETMA) and is an associate of the Technology Business Management (TBM) Council.
Flip the Switch on Your TBM Program
You don’t need luck—you need power.
Let AMI Power & Light Co. energize your TBM business cases.
