Thirteen cycles of building the technology budget for a 9,000-employee city-county government, and defending it in public.
The public part is what distinguishes it from a corporate budget of the same size. A private enterprise defends its technology spend to people who share its incentives. A city defends it in an open forum, to elected officials with their own constituencies, in a process anybody can attend and any reporter can quote. Every line has to survive being read aloud by somebody with no reason to be sympathetic to it.
That constraint improves the work. A refresh cycle you cannot explain in a sentence is a refresh cycle you have not thought about hard enough, and a capital request that only makes sense to engineers will not survive its first hearing. The budget is where the architecture program either has an answer for what a pattern costs every year or does not.
It sat directly on the cost model: the same allocation bases that distributed cost across agencies by measured consumption also produced the figures the budget was argued from, which meant the number an agency was charged and the number defended in public came from one source rather than two.
Outcome
Technology investment argued on terms a non-technical decision-maker could act on, in a forum where anyone could watch.