TBM – Technology Business Management
🧩 The vocabulary of IT costs
TBM addresses the vocabulary of IT costs — connecting technology spending to business value.
Founded in 2012, the TBM Council formalised a discipline that helps organisations link technology costs, consumption, and performance to business outcomes. TBM Taxonomy provides a common language across Finance, IT, and Business.
Key principle: if you cannot name it consistently, you cannot measure it. If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.
TBM Taxonomy 5.0
TBM Taxonomy 5.0 Summary View – Technology Consumers, Solutions, Resource Towers, Cost Pools
TBM Conceptual Model – how the taxonomy layers connect
Technology Resource Towers
TBM Technology Resource Towers and Sub-Towers
TBM Towers Hierarchy – Domain, Tower, Sub-Tower, Sub-Tower Element, Tags
Cost Pools
TBM Cost Pools and Sub-Pools – from financial source data to technology allocation
Solutions
TBM Solutions – Type and Category View
TBM Solutions Hierarchy – practical example
Technology Consumers
TBM Technology Consumers – Business Functions, Value Streams, Partners, External
Yärken – TBM in practice
Yärken is a FinOps and TBM platform that implements TBM Taxonomy as a working product — helping enterprises manage cloud, SaaS, and IT costs with AI-driven insights. It is a concrete example of taxonomy enabling business value at scale.
Yärken – Sankey diagram of IT cost flows
Yärken – Dashboard: FinOps and TBM cost visibility overview
Yärken – Dashboard detail view
TBM in practice
TBM requires organisational commitment — it is not a technology project. Start with one cost domain (e.g. cloud), apply TBM Taxonomy, prove value, then expand. Yärken and similar platforms automate the taxonomy application across data sources.
The biggest mistake: buying a tool and calling it a taxonomy. Taxonomy is a governance decision first. A process decision second. A technology decision third.
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