The Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration (ITA) is using technology business management (TBM) practices to build a clearer picture of how IT dollars are spent across the agency. Total cost of ownership (TCO) models, benchmarking, and budget execution analysis have become key tools for improving transparency and informing budget decisions, officials said.
During the Apptio 2026 Public Sector Summit in Washington on May 13, ITA and Tenacious Solutions officials said the agency’s TBM implementation is helping agency leaders better understand technology spending, align investments with mission priorities, and respond to budget pressures with more data-driven decisions.
“We provide a clear picture into their IT consumption and associated costs,” said Michael Soos, vice president of business development and client solutions at Tenacious Solutions.
Soos said ITA’s TBM work began with mapping agency budget line items to the TBM taxonomy during the budget formulation process – a process that took roughly a year to complete because of the need to coordinate across the office of the chief information officer (OCIO) and other program offices.
The agency then applied TBM practices to budget execution by analyzing monthly obligations data and comparing actual spending against planned spending to explain procurement delays, changing priorities, and shifts in demand.
“When variances arise between the spend plan and the actual obligations, in the past, sometimes there wouldn’t be an answer why,” Soos said. “Now that we have TBM, we can say there’s change of priorities.”
A major focus of the ITA’s TBM implementation has been the creation of two TCO models – one centered on workforce support costs and another tied to IT products and applications used across the agency.
The staff TCO model captures the cost of supporting employees through endpoint devices, networking, cybersecurity protections, and help desk services. The second model tracks the costs of 58 IT products that support ITA mission operations and customer services.
Soos highlighted several examples of those products, including trade enforcement applications, supply chain analytics tools, an internal employee expertise directory, events management applications, and an export solutions chatbot designed to help small businesses prepare for international trade.
Soos also pointed to benchmarking as another core TBM component. The agency compares its spending and operating model against other federal organizations while factoring in mission-specific requirements such as customer relationship management capabilities and cloud adoption strategies.
“It’s more than just numbers,” Soos said. “You have to understand the qualitative aspects of the operating model to be able to put benchmarking data into context.”
Soos said benchmarking has helped explain why ITA shows lower-than-expected hardware costs compared to some agencies because the organization operates fully in the cloud and no longer maintains data centers.
Benchmarking also helps with agile decision-making, Traci Birckhead, lead program manager of technology business management at ITA’s Office of Budget and Finance, explained. “Benchmarking isn’t perfection … it’s to let you know if you’re headed in the right direction and if there are some nuances of what you can do or why you’re not doing it,” Birckhead said.
Officials said TBM data became especially valuable after ITA faced a recent $50 million budget reduction. “Because we’d already implemented this methodology, we were able to make some common sense of the numbers, and we were able to figure out where we could cut some things [and others] we couldn’t cut,” said Tanya Smith, director of ITA’s Office of Budget and Finance.
Smith added that the TBM model helped ITA’s OCIO reduce projected costs. “Our OCIO shop was able to submit a formulation budget … that reduced their cost by 30%,” she said. “We were able to use our TBM data and the metrics from it in order to help them make that.”
Smith said the agency is exploring future use of TBM data to support investment review processes at the department level. “We’re working on getting there,” she said. “We are further along in our journey than several other [Commerce] bureaus.”