Budgets are tightening. Expectations aren’t. If you’re responsible for managing, justifying, or communicating IT spend, that gap is your daily reality.

About the speaker: Bob Bracco; a twenty-plus-year veteran of IT financial management and technology business management, walked through what separates ITFM programs that deliver lasting value from those that stall, restart, or quietly fail during a live session. Watch Here

Here are the key takeaways.

Start with a unified financial language

IT speaks in gigabytes and server counts. The business speaks in outcomes. These two groups are often working from fundamentally different vocabularies, and that disconnect is where ITFM programs lose credibility fast.

The first job isn’t building a dashboard — it’s establishing a common language that lets IT costs map to things the business actually cares about: cycle times, service delivery, competitive positioning. Once that bridge exists, everything else gets easier.

Data integrity isn’t glamorous — but it’s everything

The number one challenge Bob sees across clients, even in 2026, is data quality. Organizations rush to stand up tools and platforms without establishing clean, reliable data inputs first. The result is a program built on a shaky foundation.

His advice: bring data in raw, never modify it before it enters your solution. If you find gaps or anomalies, bring them back to the product owners and let them fix issues at the source. Changing data yourself means you own the errors.

The good news: AI-assisted data healing is increasingly built into the platforms feeding ITFM programs, making ongoing data quality management less manual than it used to be.

Define ownership at every layer

A well-built ITFM program has clear owners at each step: the systems feeding data in, the platform itself, the business units consuming reports, and the C-suite stakeholders driving direction. Without defined ownership, making changes — even small ones — becomes disproportionately hard.

This also means you need executive sponsorship. Programs that lack buy-in from senior leadership don’t survive long. The CIO and CFO need to be behind the vision, and it’s the ITFM practitioner’s job to implement and sustain that vision — not to invent it independently.

Run, change, transform: a framework that resonates upward

One of the most practical frameworks for communicating IT spend to leadership is the run/change/transform model:

• Run: What does it cost to keep the lights on?
• Change: What are we spending to improve existing capabilities?
• Transform: What are we investing in genuinely new capabilities?

Categorizing costs this way gives executives levers they can actually pull. If the run bucket is too heavy, leadership can make targeted decisions to reduce it. This framing turns an IT expense report into a strategic conversation.

Showback before chargeback — and be patient

Jumping straight to chargeback is one of the most common ways ITFM programs fail. The behavioral and political fallout can be significant when business units suddenly receive bills for services they perceived as free.

The better path: start with showback. Produce a bill of IT services and share it with business unit leaders — not to charge them, but to educate them. This builds transparency, surfaces data gaps (like departed employees still assigned to devices), and gives business units time to understand and trust the numbers before money starts moving.

Most successful organizations run showback for one to two years before switching to a full chargeback model.

Want to learn more about chargebacks? Here is a good resource: Demonstrating IT’s value through chargeback: 3 practical steps to get started

Don’t over-customize — evolve deliberately

There’s a temptation to build the perfect taxonomy from day one, or to adopt a framework and then bend it beyond recognition trying to make it fit. Both approaches tend to backfire.

Pick a standard TBM taxonomy that’s close enough to your business, stand it up, and then iterate. Your taxonomy should evolve as your organization matures — it’s not a one-time decision. Vendors like Cimpl, Gartner, and Forrester all offer starting points; the best one is the one you’ll actually maintain and improve over time.

Outcomes, not widgets

The shift from tracking IT assets to measuring business outcomes has been underway for about seven years, accelerated by cloud adoption. When infrastructure moves off-prem and becomes transactional, it becomes far easier to connect a cost to a business outcome.

The practical implication: define your end goal first, then work backwards. If you know what success looks like for the business — faster cycle times, better cost per transaction, lower operational overhead — you can build your ITFM program to demonstrate progress toward those outcomes. That’s what gets executive attention and keeps programs funded.

Maturity takes time — and that’s okay

ITFM programs are never “fully implemented.” They mature through iterations, through better data, through broader organizational buy-in, and through the feedback loop that transparency creates. Business units that understand their IT costs make better decisions. Better decisions produce cleaner data. Cleaner data enables better reporting. The cycle compounds.

It can take a year or two for a program to really bear fruit. That’s not a sign of failure — it’s how the process works.

Want to go deeper?

If you’re building or refining an ITFM practice, Bob recommends the ITFMA (IT Financial Management Association), which runs workshops on budgeting, unit costing, and building a bill of IT. Check out their next event near you.

And if you’re evaluating platforms or want to discuss where your program stands, the Cimpl team is happy to help — whether you’re just starting out, doing a restart, or looking to get more value from an existing solution.

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Watch the full on-demand webinar to hear Bob walk through these frameworks in detail, including real-world examples from organizations across industries. watch now