Companies all over the world are embracing digital transformation (DX) and industrial transformation (IX) as a means to improve relationships with their customers, distinguish themselves from their competitors, and ensure survival by internally optimizing and connecting various aspects of their business. To succeed in this endeavour and get the most from their technology investment, they must deal with a heavy burden: technical debt. 

Technical debt occurs when an imperfect short-term solution is implemented that will require a more substantial fix later. It includes disparate business processes, added (usually desktop) software to accommodate them, and additional work-around time and effort.

Technical debt is the result of shortcuts where quick, low cost fixes are implemented rather than making a long-term investment to solve the over-arching problem. These shortcuts cause long-term problems. Technical debt adds enormous friction any time people need to coordinate and work together across silos. There’s the ongoing expense to exchange data between disconnected business processes and the unquantifiable costs associated with being slowed down by these inefficient procedures and siloed data. There’s a high price to pay to redesign and simplify these systems. There’s more bad news: technical debt and its costs compound over time.

On the surface, technical debt may be dismissed by business leaders as a symptom of the way their IT departments manage business systems, data, and IT. This camouflages the root cause of the problem where technical debt stems from the way the businesses are structured, forcing people in departments to develop their own systems and work-around procedures to get their work done. These measures create more silos and add complexity; but without them, the business would not work.

Technical debt grows as departments adopt increasingly disparate business processes and siloed solutions. To wrestle this problem to the ground, business leaders must first articulate the over-arching problem, develop an operational excellence strategy designed to solve the problem, and define the strategic objectives to drive the solution. Then a set of initiatives must be created to fulfill their C-suite’s strategic objectives, and bridge the gap between where the organization is today and the C-suite’s vision of the future.