Tech Debt: Reclaiming Tech Equity

As with financial debt, a degree of tech debt is an unavoidable cost of doing business, and it needs to be managed appropriately to ensure an organization's long-term viability.

A mismatch between funding and strategy, with resource allocation out of sync with portfolio management and no agreement on how to estimate total cost of ownership

Treat tech debt as a business issue, not a technology problem. The ownership of tech debt for an app or system should be traced down to the profit and loss (P&L) it serves. Dashboards tracking this debt enable leaders to reflect the "interest" costs for their business in their P&L statements. To reinforce shared responsibility for outcomes, efforts to tackle the debt must be clearly linked to strategic priorities, such as simplification and risk reduction.

Excessive complexity in products (with a high proportion of bespoke products that could be simplified), processes (with little or no standardization between regions or businesses performing similar tasks), or applications (with multiple apps serving the same purpose)

Note that the goal is not to reach zero tech debt. That would involve devoting all resources to remediation rather than building points of competitive differentiation.

Some companies find that actively managing their tech debt frees up engineers to spend up to 50 percent more of their time on work that supports business goals.

Start with a shared definition of tech debt. Business and IT leaders need to agree on what constitutes tech debt. One organization defined it as the negative impact of technology on the business, particularly as manifested in rising operational and technology costs, slower time to market, and reduced flexibility.