TBM Council
What is TBM Council?
The TBM Council is a nonprofit organization that defines and promotes Technology Business Management. It maintains the TBM Taxonomy and TBM Framework and brings together technology and finance leaders.
Updated November 2026 · 5 min read
The TBM Council is the nonprofit organization behind Technology Business Management. It defines the standards that TBM practitioners use, most importantly the TBM Taxonomy and the TBM Framework, and it publishes guidance, research and training on how to apply them. It also serves as a professional community for CIOs, CFOs, technology finance leaders and TBM practitioners.
The Council was formed in 2012 to establish TBM as an industry-wide discipline rather than the practice of a single company or vendor. Its work gives organizations a common language and a shared set of methods for managing the cost and value of technology, which is what allows TBM models to be compared and benchmarked across companies and industries.
Definition of the TBM Council
The TBM Council is a professional nonprofit organization focused on the discipline of Technology Business Management. It was incorporated as a nonprofit in 2012, with Chris Pick as its founding president, and grew out of a group of CIOs who had been working together on how to manage technology like a business.
Its founding advisors included CIOs from large enterprises across several industries, and early work drew on contributions from practitioners and from Apptio, a provider of TBM software. Today the Council operates with a board of directors, a standards committee and a community of members around the world.
Standards and Publications
The Council's most important output is the TBM Taxonomy, the standard model for classifying technology costs into cost pools, resource towers, solutions and consumers. The Council updates the taxonomy periodically, most recently with version 5.0 in 2025, which added dedicated treatment for cloud, SaaS and AI.
It also maintains the TBM Framework, which describes the foundations, model, outcomes and value drivers of a TBM practice, and publishes industry-specific taxonomy extensions, modeling guides, metrics and research for practitioners.
Community and Education
Beyond standards, the Council provides a community where technology and finance leaders share experience. It runs conferences, regional events and online sessions where practitioners discuss how they apply TBM in their organizations.
The Council also offers education and certification for TBM practitioners, along with assessments that help organizations measure the maturity of their TBM practice. These programs help build a common level of skill across the profession, from analysts who maintain cost pools and allocation rules to leaders who run a TBM office.
Members range from large enterprises and public sector agencies to consultancies and software providers. The mix of perspectives is part of the Council's value, because practitioners can learn how organizations with different structures, industries and levels of maturity approach the same problems.
Importance of the TBM Council in IT Financial Management
Without a neutral body maintaining shared standards, each organization or software vendor would define its own categories for technology costs. The Council's standards are what make TBM a discipline rather than a collection of individual approaches.
For practitioners, the Council provides reference material, peer connections and a recognized standard that helps them explain and defend their methods within their own organizations.
A Common Language for Technology Costs
The Council's taxonomy gives finance, IT and business leaders a shared vocabulary for technology spending. When an organization reports its costs by the standard cost pools and towers, anyone familiar with TBM can understand the report without learning a local system.
This common language also supports benchmarking. Because many organizations classify their spending the same way, comparisons of cost per tower or per unit of service become meaningful across companies of similar size and industry.
Keeping the Discipline Current
Technology changes quickly, and the way organizations spend on it changes with it. The Council's updates to the taxonomy and framework keep TBM relevant, adding categories for cloud services, SaaS, artificial intelligence and other areas as they become significant.
The Council also connects TBM to related disciplines, such as FinOps for cloud financial management, IT service management and strategic portfolio management. This helps organizations use TBM alongside other practices rather than in isolation.
How to Engage With the TBM Council
Organizations engage with the Council in several ways, depending on the maturity of their TBM practice and the needs of their teams.
Engagement typically begins with using the Council's published standards and grows into participation in its community and programs.
Organizations do not need to be members to use the standards. The taxonomy and much of the guidance are published openly, which is one reason the TBM model has spread widely, but membership and community participation add depth that the published documents alone cannot provide.
Using Standards and Guidance
Most organizations first encounter the Council through its standards. Teams building a TBM cost model adopt the TBM Taxonomy as the structure for their model and use the Council's modeling guides to map financial data, allocate costs to towers and define solutions.
When the Council releases a new taxonomy version, organizations review the changes and plan their adoption. Keeping current with the standard ensures that internal reports remain comparable with peers and benchmark data.
Joining the Community
Practitioners can join the Council's community to attend events, access research and connect with peers. Many TBM leaders find these connections valuable for learning how others have solved common problems, such as allocating labor or gaining business adoption of showback.
Teams can also pursue training and certification to build skills, and use the Council's maturity assessments to measure progress. These programs give TBM offices a structured way to develop their people and their practice.
Examples of the TBM Council in IT Financial Management
The examples below show how organizations draw on the Council's work.
Both are illustrative but reflect typical uses of the Council's standards and community.
In each case, the organization benefited from work the Council had already done, rather than having to design its own categories or interpret changes in technology spending on its own.
Adopting the Taxonomy
A global insurer starting a TBM program uses the TBM Taxonomy as the backbone of its cost model rather than designing categories from scratch. Its finance team maps general ledger accounts to the standard cost pools, and its infrastructure team allocates those pools to the standard towers.
Because the model follows the standard, the insurer can compare its tower costs with industry benchmarks within its first year, identifying end-user services and storage as areas where it spends more than peers.
Updating to a New Version
When the Council releases taxonomy version 5.0, a technology company reviews the changes. It adopts the new Cloud Services cost pool and AI sub-towers, which better reflect its growing spending on public cloud and machine learning.
The update gives executives a clearer view of AI-related costs, which had previously been spread across compute, storage and software categories. The company uses the new view to set budgets for its AI initiatives.
Conclusion
The TBM Council is the nonprofit organization that defines and promotes Technology Business Management. It maintains the TBM Taxonomy and TBM Framework, publishes guidance and research, and brings together a community of technology and finance leaders.
Its standards give organizations a common language for technology costs and make benchmarking possible, while its community and education programs help practitioners build their skills. For any organization adopting TBM, the Council's work is the natural starting point.
Related terms
TBM Taxonomy
The TBM Taxonomy is the TBM Council's standard model for classifying technology costs. It organizes spending into cost pools, resource towers, solutions and consumers so costs can be compared and traced.
TBM Framework
The TBM Framework is the TBM Council's model for running a Technology Business Management practice. It links foundations, the TBM Taxonomy, outcomes such as transparency and benchmarking, and the value they create.
Cost Pools
Cost pools are groups of costs that share the same type or purpose. In TBM, they form the finance view of technology spending, such as staffing, hardware, software and cloud services.
IT Showback
IT showback is the practice of reporting to business units what their technology consumption costs, without billing them for it. It builds cost awareness while budgets stay unchanged.