Maritz, Unilever, Great-West Life, University Of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Fidelity International, Blue Shield Of California, Tokio Marine And Sysco Named 2018 TBM Council Award Winners

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: MaritzIn 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: UnileverAs 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 CompanyBefore 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 InternationalAs 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 ServicesAt 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: SyscoSysco'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.

© 2018 Technology Business Management Council, Ltd. Trademarks and Logos. Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners.

PR Contact

Ali Shaffer
TBM Council
pr@tbmcouncil.org

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/maritz-unilever-great-west-life-university-of-pittsburgh-medical-center-fidelity-international-blue-shield-of-california-tokio-marine-and-sysco-named-2018-tbm-council-award-winners-300744396.html

SOURCE Technology Business Management (TBM) Council