Trapped Money: How IBM Apptio Helps SLED Agencies Break Free from Legacy IT

In this episode, Triad’s team welcomes Bob Carter, Vice President of Public Sector at Apptio, an IBM Company, for a conversation about IT financial management in the public sector. Bob explains why this space has historically been underserved—with organizations relying on spreadsheets, manual processes, and siloed departments that lack visibility into their true IT costs. He shares how Apptio helps agencies answer the fundamental question: “Where’s the money going, who’s consuming it, and is it driving value?” Bob highlights the unique challenges facing SLED environments, including the tension between centralized IT oversight and departmental autonomy, the trap of legacy IT consuming 85% of budgets, and the urgent need to free up money for modernization. The conversation also explores the rise of cloud and AI spending—including one state department that burned through its AI token budget in just six months—and why budgeting and forecasting for these new paradigms is nearly impossible with traditional tools. Bob emphasizes that organizations already have the data they need; they just need the right platform to curate it and act on it. He also shares why FinOps in the cloud is the best starting point for showing quick ROI, and how Apptio is evolving to support Enterprise Business Management beyond just IT. His core message: don’t let fear of imperfect data stop you from getting started—the visibility you gain will unlock the modernization you’ve been waiting for.

Are Your IT Dollars Driving the Mission?

“Are these IT dollars driving or map back to the mission of the different departments? That is the big thing that people are looking to understand. And what if they don’t go through this process?… They’re going to be trapped in this vicious cycle of just standing in place. Yet their end users and their constituents are craving modernization… they gotta rip off the band-aid at some point. And some are doing it smartly… IT should not be part of the front office, it should be the back office.”

I Was Tired of Looking at My Business Through a Keyhole

“One of our public sector owners of the technology… was very excited when they got their executive dashboards going, and they could see their burndown… track everything by project, by initiative, by product, and track that burndown against their milestones and their goals. And he simply said, I was tired of looking at my business through a keyhole. That’s how he described spreadsheets… There’s no way to go through life… people want that broader view of everything that’s going on.”

AI Token Spend: The Runaway Train

“You definitely need to track and manage and maintain, and don’t allow it to become a runaway train on you, where you get these enormous bills, and you have nothing to show for it… What percent of AI token spend is actually going to production? I’ve heard 5%… So there’s a lot of pilots and experiments and good work being done, but at the end of the day, how do you track and manage all that? And how does it drive mission value in the end?”

The Money Is Trapped—Free It Up to Modernize

“We want people to spend every single dollar. There’s no notion here of cutting budgets… The whole theme is, the money you’re getting, and the money you get appropriated, is trapped. It’s not being spent most efficiently… because of the legacy IT, and such a high percentage of those dollars is going to keeping the lights on versus modernization. The whole goal here is to shift money that’s trapped to modernize… so you have the complete visibility you need to make better business decisions.”

You Have the Data—Don’t Let Imperfection Stop You

“There’s tools available into the platform that can curate that data to get you visibility in short order. So, the best thing to do is to get involved, get started, and don’t use the data as a way of saying, I’ll never get there because I don’t either have full control of the data, my data isn’t clean, or whatever it may be… you gotta get in there.”