Recently a group consisting of agency chief information officers (CIOs), Office of Management and Budget staffers and other federal IT experts released their report and recommendations for better IT funding and management. Their report asserts that a full embrace of “technology business management” (TBM) could save agencies $5.8 billion over five years. This information came to us from FCW in their article, “A $5.8B argument for better IT management.”
The Commission on IT Cost, Opportunity, Strategy and Transparency (IT COST) is an effort to bring to government the standards and practices developed by the TBM Council for the private sector. The $5.8 billion estimate came from Forrester’s analysis of agency IT spending, and of the sorts of efficiencies current users of the TBM model have realized.
Central to the report is the Federal TBM Taxonomy. There are defined layers of standardized categories for cost pools; “IT Towers” like compute and storage; applications and services; and the programs or business units that spend the money and benefit the IT resources.
The goal is to create “a common language so that the terms server and compute for example are understood by everyone (IT and non-IT stakeholders alike) to mean the same thing and to include the same types of underlying costs calculated using the same methods.”
Standards and consistency are both worthy goals. It will be interesting to see where these recommendations land and how or if they will be implemented.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
