Hey,

I've wanted to do this for a while but not in the traditional sense of a newsletter. More like a space that facilitates non-performative learning in our TBM/FinOps space. If you've attended industry conferences and webinars before, I think you know what I mean. I've been in this space for 15 years and I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to cultivate and share learnings across TBM beyond industry events and LinkedIn comment sections. So here's my attempt to share all the things we learn privately, anonymize it and share it broadly to our community and newcomers. I'm committing to once a month, sharing things that I'm seeing industry wide and what I'm seeing work in the TBM space. My intention is to be helpful and provoke ideas on how our skills and unique positions can help our respective organizations.

It's called Clear Enough and if anything strikes a chord, feel free to reply or forward to a friend. My dream outcome is that one monthly email prompts several meaningful email threads amongst peers.

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The brewing AI problem that I see...

We've been building AI agents and automation capabilities inside Falconbridge over the past few months. Custom skills, internal workflows, things that genuinely make us faster and sharper. And here's what surprised me: even for a small team that thinks about technology governance for a living, the speed at which useful things get created outpaces our ability to manage them. New capabilities spin up fast. Tracking what exists, what's redundant, and what's actually producing value takes real discipline, and we're a team that already thinks this way.

Now picture that inside an enterprise where thousands of employees have been told to experiment with AI. Where "vibe coding" is encouraged and teams are standing up tools without a procurement conversation. Shadow IT is back with a vengeance and it's moving faster than the last time it was a hot topic.

And I'm not sure I understand the organizational responses that I've seen. We've been reading about this new role, Chief AI Officer, and while the intention is good, I think the effect is likely to create more confusion about accountability over tech investments. We saw this exact same trend with Chief Data Officers. It created this unclear accountability issue where the CIO is relegated to managing "the old stuff." It ultimately creates these silos of technology and confusion on decision ownership and governance. Even when I'd build out cost models for clients with companies that had separate CIO and CDO orgs, it was as if you had to get permission to model the tech within the CDO org. I just see the pattern repeating itself and I wonder how our work can help bridge the likely gap that will form. Would love to hear thoughts and observations from others.

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TBM stuff I'm thinking about...

TBM executive sponsorship strategies has been on my mind a lot lately. I've seen a lot of stalled TBM programs, and it's often because they fall susceptible to the fast turnover of CIOs (~average 3-5 years) and some programs struggle with getting visibility and staying power. The conventional advice is to build the business case and show off all the great transparency you've built over time. Or spend a year working through the latest org change that messed up reports. But I'm falling in love with the strategy of finding one tech executive who says "you need to talk to the TBM team" to one of their peers. So here's my free advice for folks struggling with executive sponsorship: find one leader who has a real cost conversation coming up and show them what TCO modeling can do for that specific decision in 30 minutes. It may only focus on 10% of the spend within your model, but it could have an outsized impact on marketable value at the executive level. Sponsorship follows results.

I'm curious. What executive sponsorship strategy has actually worked for your TBM program? Not the textbook answer. The thing that actually moved the needle. Reply and tell me. I'll collect what comes back and share the best ones next month.

Gboyega Adebayo
Founder & Managing Director, Falconbridge
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