Technical Debt:
Your Biggest Obstacle (and Opportunity) to Long-Term Innovation
Written by Dr. Justin Morris, Ph.D.Contributing writer
Dr. Justin Morris is an academic philosopher turned tech writer. As a contributor at Insight, Justin applies his extensive knowledge of ethical issues to endorse sustainable practices and encourage forward-looking conduct within the tech industry.
Approximately 86% of organisations were negatively impacted by tech debt over the past year, meaning there’s a good chance it’s stifling your ability to innovate with the latest tech — whether you’re aware of it or not.
“Tech debt is very insidious in how it manifests itself,” explains Juan Orlandini, Chief Technology Officer, Insight North America and Distinguished Engineer. “You need to be meticulous about where it’s impacting you, how it’s impacting you, and what the true cost of it is for your organisation.” Left unchecked, the true cost of tech debt is digital debt, where an entire digital ecosystem strains under the weight of legacy hardware and systems.
Such an undesirable outcome raises an important question: How do organisations accumulate tech debt in the first place? One of two ways.
Tech debt is typically incurred through a newly acquired but quickly outdated technology — that’s the most obvious culprit. Or there’s tech debt lurking in something less obvious, like a system in the corner that few people in your organisation know about (and the last people who supported it may have retired years ago).
Wherever it came from, it’s important to know you’re not alone. “Everybody has technical debt,” says David McCurdy, Insight’s Chief Enterprise Architect and CTO. “It becomes either a drag on your ability to innovate or it can be the tool that can help you innovate into who you want to be.” In that statement alone, McCurdy dispels two common misconceptions about tech debt:
(1) It has no upside;
(2) it can be eliminated completely.
With that in mind, the question we’ll pursue ahead isn’t “how do I avoid tech debt?” Rather, it’s “how can I manage tech debt to my advantage?”
Now, if you think you already know all there is to know about tech debt, stick with us.
You may be surprised to learn the key to achieving unprecedented growth might just be hiding under a desk somewhere and collecting more dust than a Dyson.
Technical debt is something you need to be completely mindful of. It is absolutely going to happen.You can’t avoid it, but you can be smart about how you plan for it. If you manage it like your financial debt, you can actually leverage it to your advantage.
Limited our ability to innovate
Difficulty meeting SLAs
Outages/downtime
Other
Technical debt hasn't negatively impacted us
Technical debt is the estimated measure of a cost to replace an aging or recently adopted solution that provides limited benefits.
Digital debt is the cost and constraints incurred when digital projects prioritise immediate goals over future adaptability.
Knowing where to look for tech debt isn’t always a straightforward process. After all, there are various subspecies of tech debt: Code debt, software debt, architecture debt, document debt, among other more broadly conceived manifestations like digital debt.
Look beyond the distinctions, however, and you’ll discover that the originating cause of tech debt arises from two distinct psychological states of mind: conscious intent or careless neglect (sorry but it’s true).
The debt is taken on deliberately to meet an important deadline or critical milestone in which shortcuts are taken for the sake of speed.
Example: A startup fast-tracks the development of a product to present its viability to investors by using hardcoded values in the code. This saves time in the short-term, but it’s understood that refactoring will be needed in the long run.
The debt occurs as an unintended result of having an outdated design that doesn’t support the current requirements or technology environment.
Example: An organisation’s web platform cannot support users in different languages and regions. Discharging the tech debt to accommodate global scaling will require one of the most dreaded “Rs” (replatforming).
• Legacy systems or outdated code are slowing down your development speed.• Maintenance costs are rising as system outages are becoming more frequent.• New features or updates are routinely delayed by unexpected technical issues.
Whether it’s intentional or unintentional, the fact you have tech debt is normal. It’s tantamount to getting DOMs (delayed onset muscle soreness) after a strenuous workout — a clear signal that you’ve pushed your limits and are in the process of building stronger capabilities.
Of course, the trouble with modern IT infrastructures is they don’t always show visible signs of distress. You must do some investigative work to discover the sources of your tech debt. Three are most prominent and cause a lot of pain.
The days of spinning up computer systems willy-nilly are long gone. But not only have times changed, so has the complexity of your average data estate. Shadow IT seems like a good solution until you realise you’re left with a patchwork of legacy systems and ad hoc solutions that can seriously degrade your performance, security and scalability.
Do: Establish an organisation-wide technology procurement process and routinely audit for compliance.
Don’t: Penalise employees and fail to get the full picture of why they resorted to Shadow IT in the first place.
A project gets scoped out and initiated with the best of intentions only to have budget cuts pull the rug out from under it. The initial infusion of capital allows for the design and beginning stages of implementation.
Critical updates, essential features or necessary refactoring get put on a “to-do-much-later” list and are postponed indefinitely.
Do: Implement a phase-based approach that ensures each phase is fully funded before moving forward.
Don’t: Start projects without a long-term funding commitment that could lead to half-built systems.
Adopting generative AI can push your systems to evolve. But the mere introduction of a new technology — no matter how promising — will immediately add technical debt to your systems. That’s because without proper integration and management, today’s “bleeding edge” tech will inevitably transform into tomorrow’s legacy burden.
Do: Adopt new technologies with a clear roadmap that includes full integration, training and ongoing support.
Don’t: Succumb to “shiny object syndrome” and chase innovation without considering how it fits into your current and future IT ecosystem.
“There’s good debt and there’s bad debt,” says Marcus Benson, Principal Architect, Insight. “Just like in finance, technical debt has different levels of interest. You have a high-interest debt and low-interest debt.” What qualifies as high-interest tech debt?
“If you’re lifting and shifting, moving workloads into the cloud in an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) fashion,” Benson explains, “you’re creating high interest debt.” This approach often leads to increased costs and complexity because it doesn’t optimise the application for a scalable, on-demand cloud environment ahead of time.
Planning is the best approach. “Modernising workloads is difficult,” Benson concedes. “It requires some upfront work, analysis and investment. But it allows you to create low-interest debt that’s going to pay off over time and give you a bigger and quicker ROI.”
Full disclosure: Achieving that payoff may involve some of those dreaded “R” words I mentioned earlier, such as replatforming and rearchitecting.
Even so, fully exploiting the cloud’s flexibility (for example) necessarily means rearchitecting applications to be native to the cloud environment. It’s not a light lift, by any means. But taking this approach maximises operational efficiencies and makes it much easier to implement future changes and updates at significantly less cost.
Knowing the difference between high- and low-interest tech debt is a crucial part of understanding how to proactively manage your tech debt. Another crucial aspect is knowing when to seek expert advice.
As with all debt, its management is key. Since there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to managing tech debt, we asked our experts to super-serve you with their top strategies for getting started.
Here’s what they said:
David McCurdy, Chief Enterprise Architect and CTO, Insight
“The first step is to stop the bleeding. Build yourself a good technology architecture and bring in good people underneath you that can make strategic decisions to limit technical debt going forward. You’re not going to stop it, but you can limit it. The next step is to open up your budget. See how much of your budget is going toward maintaining systems and processes that are not adding strategic value.”
Jason Rader, VP and Chief Information Security Officer, Insight
“Acquiring new technologies like cloud services is often the easy part. The challenge lies in operationalising — ensuring ongoing maintenance, patching and governance. This includes understanding data types and managing them from a risk perspective, which isn’t always at the forefront of innovation-driven teams. Establishing strong governance and programs is essentialfor this reason.”
Rachel Jenkins, Senior Product Manager, Insight
“Do some type of audit or assessment of what you have running and where you might have some vulnerabilities. Hardware, software, licensing and resources would be a great place to start. If you can do that on your own, or if you need some consulting services to help get a deliverable, then that would be something we can help with.”
John O’Shaughnessy, Infrastructure Architect and Senior Consultant, Insight
“Keeping track. Literally having a whiteboard or a list on paper of your systems and where they are in their lifecycle. What you want is a roadmap that everybody can review and is updated regularly to figure out what’s important, what should be done first, and what can be done later. That way, you’re not running into really huge bumps in the road with tech debt.”
Marcus Benson, Principal Architect, Insight
“If you’re migrating into the cloud, modernise your workloads first and foremost. Make sure that when you are taking on that technical debt, you’re taking on that good low-interest debt. And then once you move into the cloud, make sure you’re investing in FinOps because cloud spend — regardless of the types of workloads you’re consuming — requires constant management, visibility, optimization and eyes on it all times.”
The overarching lesson from our panel of experts is clear: Active management of tech debt is a strategic imperative of paramount (yet easily overlooked) importance for your entire organisation.
Approaching tech debt with the same rigor and strategic planning as financial debt can transform potential setbacks into avenues for innovation and growth. Let’s end with a look at how you can get on the path from tech debt to tech dominance.
There weren’t five different ways to get off of the mainframe 10 years ago. Times have changed and so have the tools and technologies available to transform tech debt into a strategic tool that aligns with your immediate and future business plans.
If you read this from the start to now, you’ve already gained the knowledge you need to begin. If you skimmed (not judging; we know you’re busy!), let’s do a quick recap:
Recognise your tech debt. Determine whether it stems from intentional decisions or inadvertent neglect.
Prioritise and categorize. Address high-interest tech debt that impacts your scalability and efficiency first.
Invest in modernisation. Understand that rearchitecting for long-term agility and reduced costs will pay dividends on the initial investment required.
Don’t treat it as a “DIY” project. For careful planning and continuous lifecycle management, turn to expert advice on how to transform technical debt into a strategic advantage.
Now, when the next big moonshot lands, you won’t need to clear a mountain of tech debt to make room for the latest innovations in your infrastructure. Instead, you’ll have created the conditions where innovation can take place without fear of moving forward.
Want proof that your tech debt is all bark and no bite? Learn how Insight turned tech debt into tech dominance for a veterinary firm by modernising infrastructure across 900 locations. Read the client story.
Learn how to strategically trim your tech debt and achieve tech dominance today.
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