Technical debt is an inevitable consequence of making efficient choices about your IT landscape, but it can still hold back innovation. Learn how you can pay off technical debt without breaking the bank.
Technical debt was originally a term to describe the consequences of quick-and-dirty coding, but it's grown to mean much more. We now talk about technical debt as if it were a kind of technology amortization.
They say a car loses value as soon as you drive it away from the dealership. Nowadays, it feels like your best-of-breed technology is outdated as soon as you've implemented it, and it only becomes more so over time.
This leaves you fighting a constant battle to keep your technology functional and capable of supporting your operations at the level it needs to. Yet, not only is eliminating technical debt impossible, it's also not desirable.
You can spend your entire budget on fighting technical debt and find your organization broke, and still behind the cutting edge. The key is to know where you need to pay off your technical debt and where you need to tolerate it in order to maintain a balance between cost reduction and productivity.
To do that, you need a clear vision of your IT landscape and to understand what legacy technology is tolerable, and what's holding you back. SAP LeanIX gives you exactly that oversight and allows you to optimize your IT landscape for both cost and performance.
To find out more about how SAP LeanIX can support you in cutting back your technical debt, download our free poster:
FREE POSTER: Protect Your Organization From Technology Obsolescence Risk
What Is Technical Debt, Really?
Technical debt traditionally refers to code. When your developers choose to cut corners or make imperfect decisions in order to complete important work, that saving in time and effort will need to be paid back when the deficient code begins to cause problems and needs to be rewritten.
Code debt isn't a mistake your developers are making, but a necessary compromise that must be made to achieve your goals. As such, some level of technical debt in your code is inevitable.
The term has grown, however, to accommodate a much larger issue. Technical debt is now often used to describe the consequences of rapid advancement in technology.
As digital innovation becomes more and more rapid, even best-of-breed technology only has a limited life span. Keeping your tech stack on the cutting edge of technological advancement will cost more than any organization could afford.
Even if you had unlimited budget, constantly upgrading your systems to keep up would render them operationally useless. Yet, equally, allowing them to fall further and further behind best-of-breed will leave you unable to compete in the market.
The key, therefore, is to maintain an even balance between keeping your IT landscape competitive and your investment of money and effort at a reasonable level. Walking this line requires precise intelligence regarding your IT landscape, and the consequences of getting it wrong could be disastrous.
The Consequences Of Technical Debt
The most-obvious consequence of failing to maintain a balance of technical debt is the possibility of catastrophic failure. If a crucial system falls short and fails, your operations could grind to a halt.
In 2015, Paris-Orly airport was forced to shut down for several hours due to the failure of a crucial system. It was later revealed that this system was running on a 20-year-old Windows 3.1 computer.
Yet, this isn't the only issue that technical debt can cause. Outdated tech can also hold back your organization's productivity and innovation.
If you have a clunky, old system, then your technical teams will waste their time constantly repairing it. Even when it's working, it will be slow to use, harming your team's productivity.
Worst of all, when you want to take advantage of innovative tools like artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing, your technology won't be able to support it. This will leave you falling behind your competition in the market.
Managing your technical debt can be the difference between seeing your business thrive and watching it fail. So, how do you keep on top of technical debt?
Paying Off Technical Debt...
To pay off your technical debt, you need to know precisely what technology within your IT landscape is approaching obsolescence so that you can replace it. However, things aren't quite that simple.
Before you can replace your obsolete technology, you need to know precisely what that technology is being used for and what it supports. If you remove an important piece of technology from your tech stack, you need to make sure that it's not going to fall down.
Being certain of that means knowing exactly how that stack is structured and which pieces of it are reliant on others. Some technology is going to be unconnected to anything else and can be safely removed, while other technology is crucial to your operations.
For example, you may have an entire network that acts as a sandbox environment to test out modifications to a non-essential system, which will have no impact on your business if it is shut down. On the other hand, a seemingly innocuous outdated spreadsheet may contain formulas that are essential for your customer relationship management (CRM) system to run.
To cut out the obsolete tech from your IT landscape, you don't just need to locate it all, but you also have to have complete clarity on how it's connected to the rest of your landscape so that you can surgically remove it. This applies just as much to your physical IT components as to your software, as removing a server or operating system can be as damaging as retiring an application.
Regardless, once you know you need to remove a component, you need to ensure that you know who is using the old software and hardware. Users will need to be informed and retrained as part of a change management exercise.
As you can see, paying off technical debt is extremely challenging and could be impossible without the right insight into your application portfolio. That's without even considering the consequences of being overzealous.
...Without The Cost
Keeping your entire IT landscape state-of-the-art requires too much expense, resource, and disruption to your operations. If you're constantly ripping out and replacing your technology, you'll end up bankrupt and you'll never get anything done.
To optimize your expenditure, you need to know which of your software and hardware items is 'good enough' to support your operations sufficiently. It's not about having the best technology, but having just the right technology that you need at the lowest possible cost.
This is a master balancing act, and it requires even more close attention to the finer details of your IT landscape than simply cutting away obsolete items. Achieving this balance requires continuous monitoring of your setup and careful analysis of the information.
That requires a tool that can continuously monitor your IT components and application portfolio for obsolescence, and tell you which technology is mission-critical and which is 'good enough'. That's why you need SAP LeanIX.
To find out more about how SAP LeanIX can support you in cutting back your technical debt, download our free poster:
