Managing Technical Debt in the Midst of Modernization

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, enterprises struggle to manage technical debt while striving for innovation and growth. Technical debt, often seen as a silent killer of enterprise’s advancements, can limit their agility with outdated technology and complex architecture, leading to increased vulnerabilities. If not managed at the right time, it can turn substantial, accounting for up to 40% of the IT balance sheet, according to McKinsey. 

However, enterprises often neglect to manage technical debt as part of regular IT maintenance and health checkups as they see it as less glamorous than following trendy transformation initiatives. They postpone such activities while prioritizing large modernization initiatives that capture the bulk of their attention and energy. But unmanaged technical debt can hamper such initiatives simply because tech landscape and skill-pool may not be ready for transformation. Also, the added burden of paying back technical debt before a modernization initiative prolongs the time-to-value and increases project complexity and cost. 

Here are the key considerations for enterprises to efficiently manage their technical debt while modernizing: 

1. Establish threshold 

Zero technical debt is a mirage. Achieving zero technical debt would require tremendous effort, especially considering the ongoing accumulation of new debt due to changing technology and architectural standards. Instead, enterprises should strive to maintain technical debt within an acceptable limit to enable business innovation, in quickest time possible while minimizing the investment in technical debt management.  

Related:How To Get Rid of Technical Debt for Good

Prioritizing debt based on type and severity is just as important as determining an acceptable level. There may be some debt that has to be eliminated at all costs, such as security vulnerabilities. On the other hand, other types of debt may be postponed, such as design debt. Prioritization allows focus on the repayment efforts in critical areas while still bringing down the overall debt within acceptable limits. 

2. Adopt shift-left  

Rather than delivering a product and then worrying about technical debt, it is more prudent to measure and address it continuously from the early stages of a project, including requirement and design, not just the coding phase. Project teams should be incentivized to identify improvement areas as part of their day-to-day work and implement the fixes as and when possible. Early detection and remediation can help streamline IT operations, improve efficiencies, and optimize cost. 

Related:How CIOs Should Be Managing and Reducing Technical Debt

3. Think global, fix local 

Ideally, enterprises should implement a technical debt management process that involves strategizing at the enterprise level and addressing it at the individual application or system level. Each system’s technical debt should then be attributed to the respective units for better accountability and management. It will encourage ownership within the units, fostering proactive and collaborative engagement in finding solutions instead of an enterprise-wide initiative.  

Attempting a swift and drastic reduction of technical debt in one aggressive move is not advisable as it can hinder an enterprise’s day-to-day operations and impact competitiveness in the short term. Instead, IT teams can incorporate incremental debt reduction efforts into each sprint, thus gradually reducing accumulated debt.  

4. Piggyback on modernization initiatives 

Since separate budgets may not be available for technical debt management, technical teams need to piggyback these on the larger modernization initiatives. For example, enterprises planning to migrate to cloud can manage the version debt and migrate their applications/servers to the latest supported versions. By doing so, they would face less difficulties during the execution of larger cloud migration initiatives as workloads would be compatible and supported, which will take care of a large chunk of the technical debt. 

Related:Rubrik CIO on GenAI’s Looming Technical Debt

5. Automate, automate, automate 

Investing in automation of technical debt detection and remediation can make the entire process easier to adopt, accelerate debt repayment, and reduce barriers to initiate modernization programs. Enterprises can look at delivering automation through developer platforms such as IDEs or CI/CD pipelines to ensure uniformity and standardization. Platform-based automation integrates debt detection and remediation tooling into the SDLC, helps reduce manual errors and makes it easier for various teams to work and collaborate. 

Generative AI has immense potential to accelerate the technical debt cycle as well. There are several commercial as well as open-source AI models that can scan the code or documentation and flag different types of debt. Similarly, AI code assistants can be used to fix issues seamlessly and repay debts in a short loop. Finetuning AI models based on enterprise’s context results in better efficiency and quality of output. 

6. Reduce skill debt 

Inadequate technical knowledge or limited experience in the latest skills itself leads to technical debt. Enterprises must invest and prioritize continuous learning to keep their talent pool up to date with the latest technologies. A skill-gap analysis helps forecast the need for skills for future initiatives. Teams should be encouraged to upskill in AI, cloud, and other latest technologies, as well as modern design and security standards. This will help enterprises address the technical debt skill-gap effectively. 

Enterprises can also employ a hub and spoke model, where a central team offers automation and expert guidance while each development team maintains their own applications, systems and related technical debt.  

Conclusion 

Enterprises must approach technical debt management as a continuous process, rather than a one-time endeavor. It requires a proactive and strategic approach in identifying and prioritizing areas of technical debt. Using an automation-based methodology to measure, report and fix technical debt can streamline its management cycle. Prioritizing an AI-first approach can help reduce the time and cost of managing technical debt. 

Ultimately, a well-executed technical debt management strategy can lead to a more resilient, scalable, and sustainable landscape, supporting long-term business success and growth.