Technical debt remains a major burden

Image

Technical debt is the antithesis of innovation. Organisations that don’t account for technical debt are increasing their level of risk significantly and are inhibiting the ability for the business to grow and become agile.

Resolving these issues starts with understanding how technical debt impacts an organisation. In many cases, this debt results from the need to support legacy systems. Over time, businesses run the risk that technical debt becomes so extreme that they can no longer innovate or migrate to newer solutions. In our view, the rush to build new services and solutions can create more technical debt, which becomes a bad investment of time and resources.

Image

Technical debt is an expense that should be minimised over time. Achieving that requires planning and budgeting, along with determining the value of eliminating legacy systems. That comes down to identifying what a replacement system or process can offer. For example, Nucleus Research reports that the cloud can offer four times as much ROI as an on-premises solution, which proves to be a good indicator as to why organisations should be looking at their investments and the return on them.

Image

Of course, dealing with technical debt means having the right people and skills in place. In terms of strategies organisations prioritise to address technical debt, the most cited one is having a knowledge base to provide information even when specific employees leave the team or company. This underscores the importance of effective succession planning as well as strong knowledge management.

This illustrates that technical debt typically proves to be as much a people problem as a technology problem. Organisations are finding that maintaining the legacy technology that creates technical debt requires having people in place that are using older skill sets, which in turn limits the time available to upskill those staffers to transition to newer systems. In addition, new or junior employees want to work on the latest technology and not the oldest, so it can impact your ability to attract and keep junior employees.

Easing technical debt also involves educating experienced and accountable IT executives and managers on how to liberate the organisation from older, problematic systems and platforms using a systematic process that fuels a start and works its way throughout the enterprise.  Additionally, today's latest technologies have the potential to become tomorrow's unloved debt. This issue can potentially be mitigated by developing and implementing built-in processes that guard against the obsolescence that increases technical debt.

Most enterprises view technology assets depreciating over a four-year time span, which in turn prompts technology vendors to sell those enterprises the latest and greatest technologies. However, companies often have a hard time moving off their older platforms, which are too big and complicated to ditch. Understanding the lifecycle of products and services, as well as the potential for obsolescence, goes a long way toward minimising future technical debt

Ultimately, organisations must seek a balance where technical debt can be reduced while also bringing staff up to speed on newer, more innovative technology.