When the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) comes knocking on agency doors for data and contracting information, how can agencies best be prepared to respond with a quick turnaround time?
Technology Business Management (TBM) – a framework used to track and justify IT spending by linking technology costs to business functions – is the answer offered by Kelly Glavin, vice president of public sector TBM at Maryville Consulting Group, and Sean Halligan, director of financial operations at Maryville Consulting Group, while speaking at Apptio’s 2025 Public Sector Summit on April 22.
“The pressure is real here,” said Halligan. “It’s not going away anytime soon. We’re kind of living in a new normal … When DOGE comes knocking, they want answers, right now – they’re not waiting weeks and months, like what we’re normally used to.”
Halligan and Glavin said that DOGE has asked agencies to provide breakdowns of spending by service area, distinguish between maintenance and modernization costs, report obligations and actual expenses by program with details on individual projects, and supply information on software contracts and their business purposes.
“We end up having to do this justification around the data as well, which takes time, right? So, if you don’t have the data for the first part, it’s impossible to do the justification,” Halligan said.
Halligan explained that using TBM enables agencies to be proactive about data instead of reactive – which allows them to address immediate concerns and have some insight into the future.
“We can make those adjustments from a long-term perspective, but now we can also react when that squirrel runs in front of us,” explained Halligan. “We can dodge it, and we can get away from it.”
Glavin said that the Trump administration’s shift toward TBM is creating a cultural shift toward transparency, pushing agencies to find ways to fund modernization now that budgets are getting smaller in the name of optimization.
“TBM will allow us to identify what those optimization opportunities are, align IT investments to those mission priorities, and then anticipate the questions we’re going to get from DOGE, because we’re going to have data captured in so many ways that we can pivot it and provide it back in the ways that we’re being asked,” Glavin explained.
Glavin said that some of the things that TBM can assist with include vendor spending and contract detail tracking, total cost of ownership for IT services, organization-wide technology spending to identify opportunities to scale up or down, and conducting ongoing management.