In a previous post I discussed technical debt from an information technology perspective, what it is, and how it accumulates. So you know what it is and how it grows.

What were you thinking?

But you might be thinking

Technical debt so what?

Who cares?

Big deal. My stuff still works fine on the old versions.

It doesn’t matter that I am running 3 versions behind on Windows or MAC is still on Snow Leopard.

My site still runs fine on version 3 of WordPress, nobody complains.

That old version of works for me and runs for my needs fine. Why waste my time with updates and changes?

As a business owner you want to make an investment in technology and have it be as maintenance free as possible. I get that. I had a boss one time say that “the customer doesn’t want to pay for your platform updates“.

However, technology is a fast moving target these days. Things change quickly and in most markets customers have more choice than ever. So before you cry “Update, schmupdate”, there are a myriad of things to consider in terms of the effects of technical debt on your business.

Areas of technical debt impact for your business

Technical debt limits your ability to take advantage of opportunity. I have been in many meetings where the phrase “the site(or app, or server, or software) doesn’t support that” effectively ended the conversation regarding a new sales or marketing opportunity.  Not every sales or marketing opportunity is worth pursuing but at some point your technical debt can cause you to leave money on the table.

Technical debt can cost you time. A business I worked with had systems that could not automatically transmit orders between them, necessitating the manual entry of data in three different places. This was a huge time waster with duplicated effort until we completed the development to allow the orders to flow automatically.

Technical debt increases the inertia for change. Technical debt sits there like a pile of tasks that is harder and harder to move as it grows. Large amounts of dependent technical debt make even small changes difficult to implement.

Technical debt can make you vulnerable. Hackers love to exploit known issues in systems that haven’t been updated or patched properly. This can result in downtime, data breaches or worse.

Technical debt increases risk of unfavorable situations. As systems become outdated, aged, or are allowed to continue to run with known issues the risk of a business affecting event increases.

Technical debt can affect your competitiveness. I worked on a web based video delivery system where customers were asking for more speeds in multi-speed playback. Our competition had it but we didn’t. We had not had time to switch to the updated software to support that feature. It put our product at a competitive disadvantage in the eyes of the customers until we could make the necessary updates.

Technical debt make it difficult to get support. Companies who offer software and hardware usually have windows of time where support is offered for a given release or model. Once that time draws near you may be notified of “end of life” for that product. That means that the provider will no longer support you on it. You are on your own.

Technical debt can accelerate obsolesce  Technical debt has a compound effect. The longer you delay the worse it gets in a non-linear fashion. This is due to the interdependency of many information technology systems and platforms. As a simple example it works like this: A new feature you want requires an updated driver. The updated driver can’t be installed because it requires the system update you haven’t made. The system update fails because it needs more memory in the server for the new processes that run. The dependency compounds the effort and its at this point that some folks just start over.

Technical debt can affect your workforce in negative ways. Any developer tasked with maintaining a legacy software application  can attest to the drudgery that is trying to maintain something old and out dated that you didn’t write. Employees like to use relevant and current technology and they understand the advantages to the business of doing so. Brandon Savage even discusses how technical debt could cost you employees.

Keep your technical debt payments up to date

All businesses live with some level of technical debt. It’s unavoidable. Thats not the issue. The issue is knowing what the risks are and properly prioritizing the work to alleviate the debt in necessary steps along with the other business objectives.

Most of the time, the urgency of technical debt is not as high as other business activities.  It’s easy to be pushed aside in favor of the other fires a business owner or manager has to deal with.  While easy to ignore, the astute business manager will see not addressing technical debt as an unnecessary risk and avoid it in conjunction with on-going business operations.

Technical debt extracts a price, the question is when do you pay? And, just like the old FRAM commercial, you can pay now or potentially pay a lot more later.

 

Technical debt is the situation where a business uses technology that is, for whatever the reason, out of date, obsolete, ill-suited, problematic to maintain, difficult to scale to your needs or adapt to new situations the business requires.

Technical debt is the difference between what you really need longer term and what you have. It can also be the difference between what you have and what’s currently mainstream in the marketplace.

Granted, there are many different types of technology that a company can use.  I am limiting my scope for this article to technology debt related to the information technology area within a business.

How does technical debt grow?

Technical debt builds up anytime the pain or cost of a needed change is perceived to be greater than the pain of ongoing use of the existing technology already in the business. In other words, it can, in some cases, provide a short term gain. But this almost always comes at a long term expense, thus technical debt. This debt growth can happen in many ways.

For example, several new security updates are released for your system but you find yourself saying “we will install that update next quarter, we are too busy with …”

Or what if a critical portion of software in a key application has become so unwieldy to update that you are breaking the nightly build and test on a regular basis and you find yourself thinking “we can refactor that code in the next release because we don’t have time now“?

What about that 5 year old server that is running the accounting software that has been end-of-lifed by the vendor but you think “we are short on budget the rest of the year so we will put that server in the plan for next year, its running fine now“?

And on and on it goes.

Multiply this over several systems and you can see how this compounds quickly.

The changes are put off and the technical debt grows. The technical pace of change, especially in the IT and software world is rapid. If your team or business is strapped for resources it can be hard to meet the more urgent demands of the business  and have any margin left to deal with the issues of technical debt.

How is technical debt growing in your business?