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LAS VEGAS, Nov. 6, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Technology Business Management (TBM) Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing and promoting best practices for managing IT like a business, today announced Maritz, Unilever, Great-West Life Assurance, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Fidelity International, Blue Shield of California, Tokio Marine and Sysco as winners of the sixth-annual TBM Council® Awards. Each organization was recognized during an awards gala of industry peers at The Bellagio in Las Vegas during TBM Conference 2018.

The TBM Council Awards honor organizations that have received the highest honor for technology and finance teams for their use of the TBM discipline to demonstrate and maximize value for their organization. IT and Finance leaders are recognized for optimizing IT cost and delivery, improving enterprise agility and reshaping their portfolios, and encouraging greater innovation and business transformation.

"All of our Award winners this year demonstrate the power of TBM and the strength of the TBM community," said Chris Pick, TBM Council Founding Board Member and Apptio CMO. "It's always tough to determine the winners as we have such an engaged and innovative group of professionals who are constantly striving to do more: optimize IT spend, improve business performance, and drive innovation. We had more than 70 submissions this year, and it was incredible to see the ways in which so many IT organizations are increasing their value to the business by leveraging TBM."

Each nominee took the TBM Maturity Assessment and responded to an awards category questionnaire to be selected as a finalist. The TBM Maturity Assessment evaluates an organization's maturity across understanding IT costs, IT optimization, strategy and planning, and business alignment. Once selected as a finalist, each organization was evaluated by an independent panel of judges consisting of members of the TBM Council Board of Directors, TBM Council Members and Principal Members.

In every category, this year's finalists are divided between traditional TBM use cases and "pacesetters" who have implemented and realized significant value with TBM within the first 18 months. Winners of the 2018 TBM Council Awards are:

Business Alignment Award: Recognizes an organization that shifts from being an expense center to delivering services with greater flexibility (e.g., on demand) and transparency of cost, consumption and quality.

• Winner – Below $1B in IT Spend: Maritz
  In 2015, Maritz began to decentralize IT, while at the same time, reducing its budget. By enabling cost transparency, Maritz's IT department was able to reduce its infrastructure budget by 35%, from $50 million to $32 million in just three years. Utilizing cost transparency and TBM has allowed Maritz to embark on an IT transformation journey that increased the businesses' confidence in IT, cut costs, improved service levels and enabled IT to channel savings to new initiatives.
• Winner – Above $1B in IT Spend: Unilever
  As a provider of fast-moving consumer goods, there are three main components to Unilever's digital challenge. These components are: consumers interacting with the company and products via e-commerce and physically, selling more "intelligently", and reimagining supply chain and fulfillment options to meet varied needs. Prior to adopting TBM, 80% of Unilever's IT costs were a black box. By 2017, Unilever had flipped those numbers and in 2018 Unilever had pulled 10% of IT's run budget and increased their change-to-business budget by 11% through cost transparency. This allowed the organization to open the "black box" and define each service provided and highlight value.
• Winner – Pacesetter: Great-West Life Assurance Company
  Before adopting TBM about 18 months ago, the Information Service (IS) Department for Great-West Life was wrangling over costs and allocations and not focusing on the value technology itself brings to the organization and its customers. However, since using Apptio's Bill of IT as a chargeback mechanism, business areas have been able to realize significant savings. For example, one area was able to realize a reduction in charges of about $2.5 million over the past 18 months and as a result, they've reduced annualized charges by about $4 million.

IT Optimization Award: Recognizes the strategic and bold use of data to drive decisions for technology efficiency, agility, quality, performance and business value.

• Winner: University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
  Understanding and controlling the unit costs of services was major focus for UPMC. To address this, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) has implemented TBM to rein in costs of a sprawling IT organization that supports 40 academic, community, and specialty hospitals, more than 600 doctors' offices and outpatient sites, and a portfolio of health insurance companies with more than 3.5 million covered lives. As a result, UPMC has retired more than 70 applications, taking over $7M of annual maintenance costs out of budget which has resulted in a couple hundred millions of dollars in new revenue.
• Winner – Pacesetter: Fidelity International
  As the demand for new technology increases, Fidelity International's IT department is under intense pressure to deliver more capabilities with either the same or fewer resources. This means IT must find ways to shift budget from run-the-business (RTB) spending to change-the-business (CTB) spending. To address this, Fidelity has been utilizing TBM and cost transparency to examine costs in real life. This has allowed them to achieve 50/50 RTB to CTB ratio all while pulling a significant number of dollars out of the IT budget.

Strategy and Planning Award: Recognizes organizations who have found a way to develop and maintain an IT strategy and corresponding planning processes to enable IT to be the businesses' value partner.

• Winner: Blue Shield of California
  Prior to adopting TBM, Blue Shield of California had a long share of IT financial management headaches, such as repetitive data entry tasks, business managers requesting bigger budgets and senior management wondering if IT was delivering the value they need to achieve their objectives. By implementing IT Planning, Cost Transparency, Business Insights and Vendor Insights, Blue Shield was able to address all these pain points and turned their cost center into a friend of the CFO. For example, in 2017, Blue Shield was able to identify $6M of non-IT costs being misallocated, resulting in redeployment for innovation within the business.
• Winner – Pacesetter: Tokio Marine North America Services
  At Tokio Marine North America Services (TMNA Services), IT effectively operates like a stand-alone business unit and accounting for finances in a meaningful way was a challenge the organization faced. Everyone wanted a change and TBM was the way to do it. Within 16 weeks of implementing TBM, IT finance went from spreadsheets and "gut checks" to full cost transparency and within 18 months the TMNA Services' relationship with the business has been transformed. For example, the ability to track forecast actuals to every month is allowing IT to better align its resources with the needs of the business.

Innovator of The Year Award: Recognizes technology organizations that have applied technology business data and process to better satisfy the needs of the business and change conversations from cost to value (via tradeoffs).

• Winner: Sysco
  Sysco's product and service development teams are adopting Agile and DevOps to build innovative new products and services faster, so they can roll them out in small, manageable chunks to end users on a continuous cycle. However, the challenge that they face is the traditional GAAP accounting methods don't capture the dynamic reporting that's required with Agile and DevOps. Since adopting the TBM Taxonomy, Sysco has been able isolate costs and break out information in a way that allowed them to present a methodology to the standards board, which has allowed them to drive cost savings across IT products and its service portfolio.

TBM Council membership is open to any qualified IT, finance or business leader and TBM practitioners who meet the applicable membership standards. For more information or to join the TBM Council, please visit www.TBMCouncil.org.

About Technology Business Management (TBM) Council

Founded in 2012, the Technology Business Management (TBM) Council is a nonprofit organization governed by an independent board of business technology leaders from a diverse group of the world's most innovative companies like Aflac, State Farm, Tyson, Intuit, First American and more. The Council is focused on developing a definitive framework for managing the business of IT by establishing standards and providing ongoing collaboration and education opportunities.

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SOURCE Technology Business Management (TBM) Council