Managing technical debt is a fine balancing act. When left uncontrolled, it becomes a barrier to growth, slowing down innovation and negatively impacting competitiveness.
If this is something that you can relate to, you’re not alone. Intelligent CIO reported that 91% of CTOs saw technical debt as their biggest challenge for 2024.
While it’s true that some technical debt may be inevitable, it should not be ignored. Over time, technical debt can increase operational and maintenance costs, reduce performance and productivity and create security risks. So, it’s important to establish governance and create a plan to manage the debt.
In this blog we discuss five common causes of technical debt, and the step’s businesses can take to mitigate them.
Legacy technology
Aging technology can be a money pit and a resource drain. Legacy systems contribute to reduced efficiencies and security risks, slowing down innovation and contributing to technical debt. As hardware and software ages, vendors stop rolling out updates, patches and security fixes and vendor support stops. Not only does this increase a company’s vulnerability, but additional resources are then required to create workarounds and fixes. And when it comes to digital transformation, legacy technology creates additional complexities that compound technical debt. For example, they may not integrate with cloud platforms or APIs, meaning IT teams need to find short cuts and quick fixes – all of which contribute to long-term maintenance overheads.
To reduce this technical debt, you need to have full insight into your business systems so that the retirement and replacement of hardware and software can be properly managed. Start with an assets audit and catalogue the age, technical health and support status of all hardware and software. From here, you can measure the size and cost of your tech debt, identifying high-risk areas and prioritising improvements based on business impact. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but embracing a structured, strategic approach to managing legacy technology out of the business, will help balance risk, cost and long-term value.
Investment reluctance
There are some very practical and understandable reasons why a business might show reluctance to invest in the reduction of technical debt. Aside from the obvious budgetary constraints and cashflow challenges, difficulty in quantifying a clear ROI can make investment hard to justify. Often, there are competing internal priorities, but limited internal resources and the pressure to innovate may see funds allocated to the development of new products and services rather than to decreasing technical debt. And then there is the fear of disruption, which is usually seen in more risk averse organisations where resistance to change is common and the benefits of reducing technical debt may not be fully understood. All of this can lead to a “just make it work” mindset of workarounds, which over time accrues technical debt.
A good way of overcoming investment reluctance is to educate stakeholders around the long-term benefits of technical debt reduction, such as improved speed of innovation and operational efficiencies. Calculating your Technical Debt Score (TDS) is a good way of showing the correlation between technical debt and business performance. This simple metric helps organisations to quantify the scale of their technical debt against their peers while creating achievable targets to improve, lowering risk and securing long-term performance.
Shortcuts and quick fixes
When budgets are limited and deadlines are tight, there can be an increased pressure to deliver, fast. This can often lead to the creation of shortcuts and quick fixes, simply to get the job done on time. Other times, shortcuts are rolled out deliberately to validate new ideas or as part of a testing phase. There will no doubt be every intention of tidying up these quick fixes eventually, but in the time pressured world of day-to-day business, this can fall by the wayside. Over time, these temporary solutions create technical debt that can increase network complexity, making future business developments harder to achieve and slowing down innovation.
By setting clear standards and making the reduction of technical debt a priority across the business, any unnecessary shortcuts and quick fixes can be avoided. When long-term strategy is the focus, this can shift the mindset from “just get it done” to one of sustainable growth and continuous improvement, meaning that teams will focus on the bigger picture. Stakeholder involvement is important here too so that deadlines can be negotiated with the impact of technical debt in mind. Educating everyone around the risks of technical debt, from C-suite to product owners to IT teams, will help to create a culture where quality and long-term progress is prioritised over quick wins and short-term gains.
IT silos
IT silos are a major contributor to technical debt. Recent estimates report that globally, businesses lose an average of $3.1 trillion each year due to the lost revenues and decreased productivity created by data silos, as well as missing out on opportunities to innovate. Siloed IT restricts the flow of data and communication, hindering collaboration and creating duplication of work. Disparate systems can create challenges when integrating new deployments or modernising infrastructure and can also result in longer lead times for troubleshooting, slowing down business. Meanwhile, inconsistent standards can make IT difficult to manage, reducing efficiencies and adding to technical debt.
Eliminating, or at least reducing IT silos should be high on the agenda. This requires shifts across technical, organisational and cultural mindsets and full collaboration from the top down, across all departments. As systems are streamlined and data policies rolled out, having all employees and teams aligned and working towards clear, common objectives will help drive adoption. As the business moves towards centralised operational systems and a single source of truth for data management, it will become easier to prove regulatory compliance whilst bottlenecks are removed, and efficiencies improved.
Poor maintenance
If you neglect to regularly maintain IT systems you run the risk of small issues turning into big problems, which ultimately impact productivity and profits. Infrastructure stability can be affected as servers and network hardware become slow or fall over, and firefighting IT teams are more likely to roll out sticking plaster shortcuts and workarounds, adding further technical debt. What’s more, frustrated employees will look to find their own workarounds, for example personal cloud storage, to enable work to continue, thus creating new silos and increasing the threat surface area. Poor maintenance also introduces compatibility challenges and security vulnerabilities that can put the business at risk.
Maintenance needs to be proactive. Establishing, and sticking to, regular maintenance schedules will enable teams to keep on top of patching, updates, archiving and backup and recovery testing. Asset management should be prioritised, with an up-to-date inventory of data, hardware, software and licencing helping with compliance. Continuous monitoring tools could also be deployed to track performance, identifying issues before they become problems and removing bottlenecks, fast. Well maintained systems help to ensure long-term stability, reducing the need for disruption and the associated technical debt.