Surviving Technical Debt: Protecting Your Company's Future

Technical debt is the cost of extra effort that occurs for selecting the quickest rather than the best solution. There are many instances when technical debt is worthwhile. However, your organization needs to know the pros and cons of quick judgments and how to handle tech debt effectively.

What is technical debt?

Technical debt is the cost of selecting a quick or inexpensive solution over a time-consuming and expensive alternative. It is the price you have to pay for using or supporting a subpar technology.

Technical debt allows you to quickly achieve a goal today but will require remediation at a higher cost in the future. This is much like financial debt, where you borrow money now and pay it back with interest later.

Examples of tech debt

1. Hardware debt

Hardware debt is when businesses employ hardware that is out-of-date or unsupported. Security vulnerabilities, poorer performance, and higher maintenance expenses are the risks associated with hardware debt.

Usage of consumer-grade WiFi gear, outdated servers, and outdated switches and routers for networks are some common hardware debts.

This results in decreased productivity, more downtime, and higher expenditures. Lack of action on hardware debt can have an adverse impact on costs, productivity, and other factors.

2. OS debt

When organizations stick with an old operating system, even though there's a newer, safer one, they accumulate OS debt.

This might lead to security risks, compatibility problems, and reduced performance.

3. Tools debt

Software development teams create tool debt by using outdated or inefficient tools for various processes.

This results in decreased productivity, longer development cycles, and increased costs.

4. Application debt

Application debt occurs when software applications are developed without properly addressing the potential issues that can arise from scalability, maintainability, or extensibility.

Such applications can be difficult to modify or extend. This leads to poor performance and is hard to maintain or update over time.

5. Data debt

Data debt is created when teams don’t catalogue, clean, and categorize their data. It drags down productivity and costs the organization money.

When it comes to data debt, it's better to prevent than to cure. As data volumes grow faster than governance and management protocols can handle, it becomes difficult to locate and classify the data.

This makes paying down the debt more difficult, and as the debt and data volumes grow, the organization has increasingly more work to do to manage them.

What is the impact of tech debt on organizations?

1. Revenue loss due to system downtime:

Simple tasks require more money to complete; for instance, updating a database breaks 100 applications.

2. Susceptible to data breaches and ransomware attacks:

Technical debt that hasn't been paid off can put your organization at greater risk of compliance or security lapses.

3. Damaged reputation:

A good reputation is essential for attracting and retaining customers.

When your systems experience breakdowns, security breaches, or slow performance, it can harm your reputation. 

4. Reduced system performance and client satisfaction:

Technical debt can lead to more frequent system outages, security flaws, and performance problems.

This ultimately degrades the user experience and client satisfaction.

5. Lack of innovation:

Organizations may find it challenging to embrace new technology or put creative solutions into practice due to technical debt.

This can hinder your ability to stay competitive in the market.

What can companies do to avoid tech debt disasters? 

• Know your assets. Understanding what technology and equipment your organization uses.
• Know their depreciation cycle. It’s crucial to know how long your tech assets last before becoming outdated or problematic.
• Create a plan that aligns with the depreciation cycle for when and how you'll replace or upgrade your technology.
• Avoid costly last-minute upgrades. Regularly scheduled upgrades are more cost-effective and less disruptive.
• Plan to upgrade 20% of your assets each year like replacing a few old computers.

The Road Ahead: Handling Technical Debt

Technical debt may occasionally be useful in advancing initiatives. However, the detrimental effects of infrastructure technical debt can affect your operations. To monitor and manage technical debt, your enterprise needs a system. You should be able to start off strong with the advice provided in this blog.

Do you need help managing the technical debt in your organization? Contact us, and we'll tell you how we can assist you with managing and reducing your technical debt.