What’s the size of your organization’s technical debt?
Unfortunately, many IT leaders can’t answer this question accurately.
Not only don’t many IT leaders know the gamut of their organization’s technical debt, but they struggle with knowing fully how it impacts their business. In addition, many IT leaders don’t have a meaningful strategy for addressing their technical debt, say experts like Andrew Sharp, research director for the infrastructure and operations practice at Info-Tech Research Group.
Put simply, technical debt is the “tax” your organization incurs because of its existing software and hardware problems.
Naturally, definitions of “technical debt” vary, but this definition from the fine folks at Gartner defines technical debt nicely—and emphasizes its debilitating effects:
“Technical debt is accrued work that is ‘owed’ to an IT system, and it is a normal and unavoidable side effect of software engineering. Teams ‘borrow’ against quality by making sacrifices, taking short cuts, or using workarounds to meet delivery deadlines. These sacrifices eventually cause the software to deviate from its prescribed nonfunctional requirements, and in the long term, they can impact performance, scalability, resilience or similar characteristics of the system. Technical debt can also accrue when teams delay performing regular maintenance on the system. Eventually, technical debt can accrue into a critical mass where the software becomes unstable, and customers become dissatisfied. Delayed maintenance can also result in significantly higher support costs when the software or its infrastructure reaches ‘end-of-life.’ ”
Assessing the Issue
So, how big of a problem is technical debt?
In 2022, an authoritative report on poor software quality estimated that the accumulated software technical debt in the U.S. was $1.52 trillion.
The Consortium for Information & Software Quality report also estimates that the cost of poor software quality in the U.S. has grown to at least $2.41 trillion. This $2.41 trillion cost is due to cybercrime losses due to existing software vulnerabilities and software supply chain problems due to underlying third-party components (yes, Open Source, I’m looking at you).
To put this $2.42 trillion technical debt figure in perspective, the annual deficit for the entire U.S. government in 2022 was nearly $1.4 trillion. In other words, organizations’ technical debt dwarfs our federal government’s annual deficit by $1 trillion.
The Burden of Technical Debt
As you’ve probably surmised by now, technical debt is a significant problem for IT departments.
Organizations spend an average of 30% of their IT budgets just managing technical debt, according to “The Innovation vs. Technical Debt Tug of War,” a recent Protiviti survey of 1,000+ CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and other technology leaders.
As for the impact of technical debt on IT teams, the Protiviti survey found that more than 20% of an organization’s IT staff spends its time managing and addressing technical debt. Put another way, if your IT staff has 25 members, five of them spend their time addressing your technical debt.
Furthermore, according to the Protiviti survey, nearly 7 in 10 organizations say technical debt highly impacts their ability to innovate.
Attention Please!
It’s staggering how little attention tech media pays to technical debt, especially when compared to topics like innovation or digital transformation. I visit CIO.com nearly every workday because it publishes a lot of quality content. However, its home page lists 14 main topics, like Generative AI, IT Management, IT Leadership, and Data Management. Still, it doesn’t have a topic dedicated to that growing trillion-dollar, innovation-hampering problem called Technical Debt.
How should IT tackle technical debt?
Tech writer Mary K. Pratt has suggested five strategies for keeping technical debt to a minimum, which is a strong, high-level starting point:
- Get analytical about measuring your technical debt
- Pay down your debt by prioritizing it on roadmaps
- Treat technical debt as the business risk that it is
- Be intentional when taking on new debt
- Recognize debt management is an ongoing process
Of course, how we define problems affects how we approach them.
Fractional CTO Yvette Pasqua has suggested the term “technical debt” should be replaced by “continuous product health.”
“When we talk about technical debt, it’s as if everyone’s shoulder slump,” Pasqua has pointed out. “So, we tried calling it continuous product health, and it’s helped us so much to get people thinking and talking about it as just a healthy, happy part of what you do every day.”
If you’re serious about digital transformation, innovation, and digital acceleration, you need to address your technical debt. Every day.
