TBMC 2019: A Review

TBMC 2019 is done and dusted.

It was quite a week.

This year’s event focused on the power of insights. Opening keynote speaker, Nik Badminton invoked thinkers and leaders from the past who used data to change the world. TBM leaders, Galileo, and the Wright Brothers: forever linked with data-driven insights.

Empathy for the challenge

Every year, TBMC attendees come together and interact with, perhaps for the only time each year, others facing the same challenges.

Hearing familiar stories from unfamiliar face builds community.  Intuit SVP and CIO Atticus Tysen called out the need to avoid “shooting for perfect data” when starting with TBM. Mature practitioners nodded their heads in agreement, new practitioners took a mental note.

TBM Award Winners 2019

Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta presented eight TBM awards for standout customer TBM utilizations across Apptio’s six pillars of TBM.

Congratulations to First Citizens Bank, State Farm, Credit Suisse, Pearson, Goldman Sachs, Department of Veterans Affairs, Pepsico, and HERE Technologies.

Insights deliver value

Data without insight is merely trivia—interesting as a standalone but not actionable.

As stated by Group Executive of Technology Gerard Florian, “Insights drive change—and we need to push hard on the culture to make it real.”

Apptio CPO Scott Chancellor presented the new offering Insights and Action Plans that notifies users of opportunities for optimization, areas of hidden spend, and variance from forecast. The power of insights is embedded directly into Apptio’s purpose-built TBM solution.

The new IT operating model: cloud

The use of cloud solutions in the new IT operating model asks new questions from corporate IT.

Pre-conference Cloud workshops hosted by President of FinOps Foundation J.R. Stormont discussed emerging metrics and practices for intelligent cloud adoption, governance and value management.

During TBMC, AWS announced changes to its pricing of Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate. Many attendees asked the same question: How will AWS Savings Plans affect our cloud budgets?

The new IT operating model: Agile

Agile development has changed the requirements for a unified view of “IT investments.”

Apptio CPO Scott Chancellor presented Apptio Agile Investment Planning—a dedicated solution to plan, prioritize, and track investments by integrating financial planning with work execution information from Agile application lifecycle management systems like Jira and Microsoft TFS.

TBM in-depth workshops

TBMC 2019 served TBM practitioners with different levels of maturity—from those trying to scrutinize their financials to close loopholes, to others looking to commercialize IT services to curb demand.

With fundamental, intermediate, and advanced tracks, attendees chose sessions that resonated with their TBM maturity—surrounded by peers at the same level of maturity. (Props to Apptio’s own Meghan Johel and Tiago Nascimento for their Insights Hunting Session and to Jenny Goodwin for her session on sharing the value of TBM within your organization. Apptio heard some great reviews for those two sessions.)

Thank you, Chris Pick

Chris Pick drove the creation of the TBM Council and was instrumental in getting it to where it is today.

As Chris moves on to his next opportunity, Apptio would like to add to the thanks expressed at TBMC 2019.

Many of us owe our careers to his leadership and advocacy for the TBM discipline.

Early Bird Pricing for TBMC2020!

TBM Conference 2020 ticket price will be $995 early-bird until May 31st, 2020, with full ticket price thereafter at $1995.