Why you need a Technology Management Office with Andrew Pratt

In this episode of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to IT podcast, the host Michelle Dawn Mooney discusses technology business management (TBM) with guest Andrew Pratt, the technology business manager for Teladoc Health. TBM focuses on providing cost transparency in IT and ensuring that IT spending aligns with organizational goals. The TBM office acts as an interface between IT and other departments such as finance, accounting, and procurement, translating best practices and financial information to IT leadership.

Pratt emphasizes the importance of understanding an organization’s maturity and challenges when implementing TBM. He suggests starting with the low-hanging fruit and addressing pain points identified by executive leadership. By implementing processes and gathering data, the TBM office can provide insights to IT leadership on improving operations, maximizing ROI, and aligning IT with the organization’s profitability goals.

Pratt advises on benchmarking IT spend against revenue, assessing the number of software applications and their impact on revenue, and monitoring cloud spend compared to industry standards. These benchmarks help drive objectives and measure the success of TBM implementation or upgrades.

Overall, TBM is crucial for organizations to gain cost transparency, improve financial responsibility, and ensure IT efforts are aligned with organizational goals. By integrating TBM processes and focusing on profitability, organizations can achieve operational excellence in IT management.

Welcome to another episode of Hitchhiker’s Guide to IT Podcast. Brought to you by Device42. On this show, we explore the ins and outs of modern IT management and the infinite expanse of its universe. Whether you’re an expert in the data center or cloud or just someone interested in the latest trends in IT technology, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to IT is your go to source for all things IT. So buckle up and get ready to floor the ever changing landscape of modern IT management.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Hello and welcome to the hitchhiker’s Guide to IT podcast series. We have a special for you today. Of course, this podcast is brought to you by Device forty two. I’m your host Michelle Don Mooney. And today we’re talking about technology business management. And I am pleased to bring on today’s guest who is Andrew Pratt. He is the technology business manager for Teladoc Health. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today.

(Guest: Andrew Pratt)

Thank you so much for having me.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

I really want to get into this conversation because we have a lot of good things to cover. But before we do, Can I ask you for a brief background?

(Guest: Andrew Pratt)

Yeah. So, as you mentioned, I lead the technology business management office here at Teladoc. The industry is leading telemedicine organization. So, graduated with my with a finance and marketing double major at Butler University. Later on down the road, got my master’s in strategic leadership. And my background has been has been in a lot of different places but primarily working in IT finance. And so started my career working to get into the finance organization. Found that individuals who excelled at understanding processes, being a business partner to the organizations they work with and then also being very good with data in terms of interpreting data, understanding how data is stored, how to pull out that and report on it, excelled me through my career. And so in moving, I constantly got recruited from finance to IT as I represented IT and then, but I found myself working in IT multiple times. So This is my second stint here at Teladoc starting in technology business management office from scratch throughout my tenure. So in short, it’s really just been an IT finance and just really focused on data in general processes and how to bring data out to dealership.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

And no easy feat, as you said, starting from scratch two times, so clearly you are the man for the job for the role of this this podcast conversation here because we’re talking about technology business management. So let’s start off with this. Let’s lay some framework here. What does a technology business management office do?

(Guest: Andrew Pratt)

Yeah, so I’m gonna give a very high level answer. But, you know, The goal is to provide cost transparency, right? And from that drive innovation and ensuring that IT stands up the IT spin is aligning with not only the IT strategies and goals, but the overall organization’s goals. Right?

And within that what we do is we’re in a unique situation, right, where we act as the interface between IT in the other departments that manage our either our operational strategies or in particular our financials, right? And that would be, of course, the finance team, the accounting team, the procurement team. Right? And so we’re that interface to be that be that team to understand what the best practices are from those other teams, understand what those other teams are doing and interpret that back to the IT so then the IT leadership can readily consume that information in a way that they can act upon quickly within their strategies. Because within their current roles, they really don’t have any time to understand. One, what the processes are, what do all these terminologies mean right? How does it relate to my business of IT, Right? They need an expert to be that in between the face of IT, to be that internal customer to the different departments feel would represent them appropriately.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

So, we have an idea of, really what the technology business management office does, why it’s so important. Let’s talk about how we go to the integration process implementing it into our current landscape.

(Guest: Andrew Pratt)

Yeah, absolutely. So, that’s really dependent on the maturity of your organization, right? And if you’re someone out there who thinking, oh, this is something that we’d be interested in that we don’t have today or if it’s something that you already have today and yet you know, paying on the maturity will dictate how you implement or how you improve on the operational side of technology business management, right? And so, I think an easy way is to start as if you don’t have one. And I would like to state, you know, in the last decade, I think this is gonna be you know, right now in the last year or so this could be a big needle across a lot of different organizations, right? Because in the last decade, there’s been steady growth. And then during COVID, a lot of companies found success, especially in the IT commerce field or, you know, if they had that established, and so everything was revenue generated. Right? How do we maintain our growth? How do we make sure that our customers are being satisfied? Right? Now, in the last year, year and a half and maybe even for the foreseeable future at least very short term, you know now it’s like, you know, revenue has gone down. How do we focus on profit? You know, how do we ensure that our organization is profitable? Right? And with technology business management, right, IT serves the organization. Right, IT is delivering on objectives, delivering on projects, right? And so with that, they’re just they don’t have a whole lot of focus a lot of times on rather if their efforts are being profitable, right? And so what we do is come in and ensure, hey, the effort upon these certain projects, working with the PMO teams, right? And understanding what processes are in place to show that we’re being financially responsible? Are we returning in that ROI? That’s a large example. Over to a smaller example on, hey, someone on the data science team wants a new application, right? Are the appropriate processes present to be able to ask why are we doing? Simply asking why, why do we need this application? Is this application a return on ROI in some cases? Is it saving man hours? Is it saving is actually saving dollars? Is it getting something out to the other, you know, the rest of the organization that’s going to save them time or maybe drive innovation for revenue. All these types of questions need to be considered from the largest projects in IT organizations working on to to an application, a certain small team might want to help improve their processes, right? And then sorry  Michelle to go back to your question, I felt like that was important to say, Right? But how do you start, right? So understand the maturity and understand what’s in place, right? And so, especially if you’re starting from scratch, you know, you can certainly segment it. Right? And I gave an example of software. Right? Let’s say there’s no process in place that’s asking, you know, why are we purchasing these applications? Right? What need is being delivered and that this application is gonna provide. Right? And so if you don’t have any processes in place and you’ve been, you know, had steady growth, however long your company has been around, you’re going to find once you start turning over some stones you’re gonna find a lot of redundancy. You’re gonna find a lot of, you know, how should I say, waste of cost, right? Your ROI, you could be maximizing your spend and that’s what drives to, hey, we need to be a more profit focused organization instead of just revenue focus organization, right? Because we’ll actually find that our EBITDA at the end of the day is higher as we’re focused on profit rather than just focus on revenue. Because a lot of times you kinda There’s a lot of downfall behind you as you’re moving forward for revenue. So, that’s what TV and Zoom are coming in, and you take that opportunity, you see them of your organization and you start segmenting it. So maybe you just focus on software, right? And getting process in place working with all the different all your different business partners to insert best practices, or at least understand what they’re working on and support them and make sure that’s integrated within the IT strategy, right? A rep, it’s with cloud spend, hardware, house capacity resource planning working. These are all different segments of the IT organization that TBM facilitates itself with, right? And as you grow and you look at this mountain as you start at the bottom, you realize you just take one segment at a time and you’ll find that throughout the climb, you’ll find more tools at your tool belt, hopefully some different applications with investment from senior leadership. And then also some more people around you that’s helping drive that operational excellence within IT.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

I love that you use the analogy of looking up at the mountain, because it’s got to be very daunting, you know, especially if there’s nothing set in place. So let’s take a deeper dive into that. I would think every business is different when it comes to the plan specifically needed for them with implementation. So, can you take us through the steps for companies either looking to start from scratch, looking at that mountain for the first time, or maybe those that already have something in place, but they really need an upgrade.

(Guest: Andrew Pratt)

Yeah, absolutely, every company is going to be so unique in terms of, you know, what they’re gonna need. Right? So there’s tons of, you know, TBM models out there that, you know, firms can take a look at it at a high level. But really, it’s just like most other processes and organizations as you’re starting a new department, you gotta understand the maturity and and really understand the challenge the team, you know, the organization has currently. 

Right? So if you’re an organization starting from scratch, right, you know, kind of simple, what’s the low hanging fruit? What’s what’s being asked of the executives? More frequently, what’s their biggest pain points. Right? So for one firm, it might be, you know, thin ops or cloud cost optimization, right, or cloud reporting, you know, where That’s not you know, TBM can be involved, but maybe there’s no FinOps team. So maybe we just need to understand our reporting and understand, hey, our products are profitable, and we don’t know that because we don’t understand the cloud, the cloud being consumed at the product level. Right? So that’s something that one organization might want. Or maybe a different organization, you know, hasn’t had any processes within their software applications for years and years and years and they know that they’re constantly getting beat up and redundancy all over the place and I say, they, I mean, IT leadership is seeing redundancy all over the place. Yet, they don’t have the time to really focus their attention on those because they’re delivering on initiatives that the organization needs to drive revenue or reduce risk or keep the lights on. So depending on what the needs, I would always follow the needs of executive leadership, especially if you’re starting a new and understand their pain points and then set OKRs, right? From that point and set your objectives, set key metrics that go along with that and attack those one by one. And so like for software, for example, you would understand what the process is, what’s procurement’s involvement with that? What’s finances involvement with that? How are the software being coded so we can get more clarity on what our software applications are doing? Right?

Those are all in the weeds intricacies that leadership from IT, one, they might not understand, but two, they definitely don’t have the time to dig in and understand and push those little details. TBM has to go in there and push that effort, receive that, understand the process work on the processes and then gather the data to report it in a way back to IT leadership to understand this is how we’re improving, and this is how scaling to improve our operations in terms of software or, you know, cloud spend or hardware or, you know, capacity planning, as I mentioned earlier, those couple of topics. So that’s where you’d want to start and that kind of goes the same exact way with where are you with your current state if you already have a TBM office already in play, right? So What’s your current challenges? Have you really understood? Have you taken the time to be that true interface between the other departments and that other departments being, you know, the accounting, the finance, the groups outside of IT right? If you’re not really taking that time to really understand where their pain points are as well, you’re gonna have a hard time integrating their processes and being like I mentioned earlier, that you’re the face of IT. You’re the customer, right? We’re their internal customer for a lot of these of these processes, right?

And a lot of this data and these different operational pieces being delivered to IT. So you know, it’s an opportunity from IT standpoint to speak to those departments understand what their challenges, right? And then they understand our challenges and now, IT strives to be implemented with what they’re doing on a regular basis. From there, you should be able to see better process flow through. And essentially, the TBM is usually not taking one entire process all by itself, which really taking the time to partner with a lot of other departments. And then implementing the best practices across the board depending on what your objectives are.

I keep hitting on it, but an easy objective explains that software application piece. Right? So, you utilize and partner with other groups to help facilitate those.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Of course, with bottom line is you want results right. Proof is in the pudding. So we want to say that whatever we’re implementing is working. So, what sort of benchmarks can companies look at when they’re doing this implementation process or maybe doing that upgrade?

(Guest: Andrew Pratt)

Yeah. So, you know, there’s certainly a couple standard benchmarks. One is definitely, IT spend their revenue. That’s that’s a favorite of mine, how are you looking against the competitors within the industry. Right? If you’re sitting at four or five percent, you know, what can we do to get it done to three percent and what’s your norm within your within your industry. Right? But a lot of benchmarks that we usually use is internally. Right? So if we have five hundred software applications and our revenue is x, does that amount of application really make sense for what we’re generating in terms of revenue? Right? And you’re more than likely if there’s no process in place today, you can certainly say no, right? And you can make some benchmarks in terms of how do we reduce five hundred applications to four hundred or three hundred or a certain percentage of maybe your total IT costs, right? So those are certainly benchmarks you can focus on. Certainly, cloud spend, you know, there’s benchmarks that you can utilize within your industry of how much cloud spend you’re utilizing, you know, especially compared to your revenue. Right, and understanding what your cloud span should be on your primary products that you’re serving, delivering out to your customers. So those are common benchmarks that we take into account when driving our OKRs within the technology business management office and that’s certainly very important to start off especially if you’re starting from anew is make sure you have those OKRs, you can create those those key metrics, right, and using those benchmarks or creating your own benchmarks. So then you can really narrow your focus a little bit. Instead of getting lost in the woods, trying to accomplish everything all at once.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Yeah, and I’m sure a learning curve is in play too, as people are going along. A lot of points that we touched on here today. Closing thoughts as we wrap up here? 

(Guest: Andrew Pratt)

Yeah, I would think the last one I mentioned, certain you’re starting new or if you find yourself, you know, within it. And I think the one thing with technology business management office, especially if you’re starting new, you’re marketing it out and you’ll find that there’s so many individuals in the IT organization has been looking for someone like you. Right? It’s amazing how they will grab onto you and ask like I need help with this or I don’t understand this or I have no idea because they’re, you know, they’re probably put in a situation when they need to own their P and L, but yet they’re not getting the information that they need on a regular basis that they also can understand to be able to own that P and L or own their own business, affect because that’s what many of the individuals at the VP or senior director, especially executive level, that’s what they’re doing. So really, you know, it goes back to my last point. Really have some objectives and key metrics to go after the start, right? Because there’s so many people that’s gonna wanna pull on your on your arm in one direction. But if you can make sure you have the proper OKRs, quarterly and yearly OKRs, especially the star just work towards those, you’ll find that your team will grow, your tools will grow, and then you’ll be able to help those other You’ll be able to spread your reach out a little bit more to help out with all the other leadership with leadership with the IT. And also throughout the process, you’ll really start to get their support. Especially if you let them know like, hey, these are our OKRs for right now, but we are taking into account what you need and that’s certainly something that’s that’s on our road map and we won’t get to it as soon as we accomplish our current goals.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Andrew Pratt, technology business manager for Teladoc Health, Andrew, Thank you so much for your time and a great conversation. If people wanat to learn more, and maybe they have a question for you, how do they do that?

(Guest: Andrew Pratt)

Yeah. Please reach out via LinkedIn. I think the information is on the channel here, but I will get back to you as soon as I can. I’m not a big social media person because I have two little kids that beg my attention, but I promise you to get me via LinkedIn. I’ll get back to you. Any questions or more than happy to do a virtual coffee instead of something like that.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Perfect. Andrew, thank you so much for your time again. Really appreciate it. And I’m sure a lot of people have some questions and we’ll want to reach out. So thank you again for being here. 

(Guest: Andrew Pratt)

Awesome. Thank you. It’s very great to be here.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

I want to thank all of you for tuning in and listening to the hitchhiker’s Guide to IT podcast series brought to you by Device42, talking about why you need a technology business management office. And if you would like to subscribe to this podcast, we encourage you to do so to hear more conversation. You can always visit device42.com for more information about device42. I’m your host, Michelle Togany, thanks again for joining us.

We hope to see you on a podcast soon.