What is “Technical Debt”, and why should you care?

You Already Face Technical Debt, Every Day. 

Open your smartphone.  How many apps do you have?  Do you use them all, or have they just been “growing” over time?

When we see an app that (convinces us) it will make our lives easier, we might just click and download the app.  Subscription fee?  Sure, at the moment, it’s worth it.  Do we already have an app that can organize our daily tasks (and do other stuff too)?  Maybe, but this is the app that will make our day-to-day better!

It’s human nature to want immediate gratification, and we tend to take immediate action to get the fast results – for example,

• “just buy a new app, I’m sure it will fix our problems”
• “just write the code fast to improve our website – we will QA it later”

… but the problem is, “later never comes”, and we just keep buying more apps, or (for software development teams) keep putting off software development QA efforts.  This is the essence of “Technical Debt” – the accumulation of technology cost, risk, complexity/redundancy and poor user experience.  In turn, there are consequences:  reduced investment opportunities for new innovations and poor operational support.

Why You Should Care: Tech Debt Symptoms and Consequences  

Key symptoms of technical debt include higher cost, risk, complexity/redundancy, and poor user experience.  While these symptoms can apply to the individual smartphone user, they have bigger consequences for large organizations.

• Cost — Application and technology investments “add up” — for both a smartphone user and IT decision maker, costs are rarely a “one-time thing”.  Ongoing subscription costs apply to both, but large organizations require system developers and IT support staff for ongoing operations, maintenance, and support.
• Risk — Data privacy is a concern for everyone, and smartphone manufacturers will frequently ask if you want to allow an app to access sensitive features of your phone, such as your messages, or your location.  The more apps we grant permission, the more opportunities there are to misuse our private data.

  Privacy and security risks are much higher for organizations that need to consider the impact of cybersecurity breaches (e.g., for custom-app code that was rushed out the door, or commercial software packages that should have been “turned off” anyway).

• Complexity / Redundancy — Maybe your smartphone has two or three task management apps, and sometimes you use app A, and sometimes app B.  Which one has the “correct” and “recent” version of your data?

  This is a small example of a larger organizational problem – redundancy between apps and technologies can introduce unnecessary expense, and also cause confusion about what is the “source of truth”.  Additional complexity with using “too many” technologies with different integration standards can slow development of new features, as developers struggle to use out of date or incompatible underlying technology.

• Poor User Experience (UX) — Consider your smartphone apps – do you want them easy to use?
  While large organizations also want their apps easy to use, it requires investment in User Experience (UX) research and design to accomplish the goal.  In the rush to deliver apps, the first thing to get cut is often the UX research and design. This typically results in products that not only are difficult to use, but establish a design legacy that forces all subsequent products to follow the same poor design pattern. Products that are difficult to use result in more user errors that increase user support costs and lost sales. If you think you can’t afford to improve the UX now, what makes you think you can afford a poor UX design for years to come?

Key consequences of the symptoms include:

• Reduced investment opportunities for new innovations – too much time and funds are spent just keeping existing systems running and paying for technology that isn’t adding value.
• Poor operational support — more “support tickets” are needed as a consequence of rapidly deployed solutions that were rushed out, and didn’t consider effective IT Service Management (such as automated tickets or self-healing when the system breaks, causing more angry end-user support calls).
• Unacceptable security risk — a typical example are critical technology components (e.g., routers or software) that have not had updates in years, causing a high risk of security breach.

What To Do: Clean-Up and Prevention 

When we reach a “breaking point” on our day-to-day smartphone use, maybe we spend some time cancelling subscriptions and deleting apps.  We might even resolve to stop buying so many apps without thinking it through, and (if our apps were really out of control) maybe even consider buying “yet another subscription to manage all our app subscriptions”.… but on a small scale, that might be the end of our clean-up and prevention efforts.

Make a plan.

For larger organizations, a technical debt clean-up and prevention plan is needed to address the bigger consequences (e.g., poor service delivery to customers), and introduce “guardrails” to prevent excessive technical debt in the future.  Conversations with product managers, business unit leads, the CIO and other C-level executive stakeholders will typically reveal frustration with their “hands tied” trying to improve service delivery — for example:

• The CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) would be concerned about security breaches, and failure to comply with key security standards and controls in new solution development efforts
• The CTO (Chief Technology Officer) would be concerned with modernizing technology infrastructure to provide more cost-effective and flexible software service development and support

The plan should be “agile” in nature — considering near- and longer-term priorities, with frequent reviews and feedback to allow course adjustments.

Invest in Clean-Up and Prevention. 

While “subscriptions to manage subscriptions” might be a low-cost way for individual smartphone owners to lower their costs and get more value out of their apps, larger organizations will need to make right-sized investments to clean up and manage their application/technology portfolio.

Clean up is typically called an “Application Portfolio Rationalization” (APR) project – a (prioritized) effort to collect, analyze and recommend which technologies to invest and retire.  The outcome of this project is typically a roadmap that recommends changes to applications and technology – for example, modernizing cloud infrastructure to accommodate more cost-effective and flexible Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options.

Prevention for large organizations has to be more than a “promise to self” to review apps on a regular basis.  Effective technical debt prevention requires changes to processes, technology, and people – for example,

• Processes for lean technology reviews, to prevent acquisition of too much technology to begin with – consider a “Lean Business Case” kanban approach, instead of heavy traditional “Architecture Review Board” (ARB) gates
• Tools and technology for Enterprise Architecture (EA) analysis, IT Portfolio Management (ITPM) and Technology Business Management (TBM) help maintain and automate technical debt prevention, such as auto-discovery of IT assets, technology roadmap maintenance, and ongoing TBM financial analysis.
• People need help adopting new processes and EA technology. For example, acknowledging that technical debt won’t be completely eliminated, but adopting an agile, guardrail mindset to reduce it, and participating in ongoing efforts to maintain data needed for portfolio analysis and adjustments.

Next Steps with LSA Digital 

With a unique, modern approach that integrates Agility-at-Scale, Enterprise Architecture, strategic IT portfolio management and IT Service Management, LSA Digital delivers sustainable IT improvements tailored to each organization’s needs – including services and tooling for both technical debt clean-up (Application Portfolio Rationalization) and prevention (Application Portfolio Management).

LSA Digital can help your organization’s technical debt clean-up and prevention journey, to drive key priorities and goals.  As a first step in eliminating your technology debt, LSA Digital invites interested leaders to take a free online application portfolio health check, or schedule a free one-hour consultation.

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