Case Study: CoBank achieves IT cost transparency and frees funds for innovation with Apptio

Hitting a TBM triple for better, more innovative and trusted IT

CoBank’s IT organization faced growing pressure to become more business-aligned amid rapid digital change. After adopting TBM and Apptio in Q3 2017, leaders sought to run IT like a business, free up funds for innovation, and become a trusted partner to the business—but lacked cost transparency, relied on outdated spreadsheets, and couldn’t accurately forecast or explain variances.

Using Apptio’s ITFMF, the TBM taxonomy and the ATUM model, CoBank established a single source of truth for IT spend, quickly identifying errors (for example reclassifying a $400,000 misposted expense to CapEx), improving forecasting, and enabling faster, data-driven decisions. In just 12 weeks they moved from constrained to visionary: reduced waste, freed run-the-bank dollars to fund transform-the-bank initiatives, built a service catalog/CMDB, and met their three original goals of fiscal rigor, innovation funding, and stronger business partnership.

CoBank

Eileen Baines

Chief Information Officer