What’s the most significant impact of technical debt from a business perspective? What business problem have you seen most often in orgs with unmitigated tech debt?
Sort by:
Impact of unaddressed technical debt -
Higher Costs: Old, messy systems need more money and effort to keep running.
Less Flexibility: It’s harder to change or improve things quickly because the systems are outdated.
Data Problems: Information gets stuck in different places, making it hard to get a clear picture.
Risk of Breaking Rules: Old systems might not follow new laws or standards, which can get the company in trouble.
Unhappy Customers: Slow or unreliable systems can frustrate customers.
Common problems that org would face -
System failures: Systems might crash, causing service disruptions.
High Maintenance Costs: A lot of money goes into fixing old problems instead of creating new solutions.
Missed Opportunities: The company might lose out on new business because it can’t keep up with changes.
Please keep in mind, that it is okay to have technical debt for various reasons (business priority etc.) as long as there is a plan to address it on time
Briefly on the impact; technical debt increases costs, reduces agility, and creates barriers when attracting talent.
Every addition to your stack, every vendor with the power to lock you in, every time you create that quick solution to just "get it done", you're making it harder to operate in the future. When you hire someone you need to include a longer list of requirements, when you take on a new technology you need to migrate from even more old technologies.
Ideally, it's best to minimize technical debt by minimizing the technology stack wherever possible. Carefully choose proven tools that can be used broadly and flexibly adapted. For code and data you want to adopt standards as much as possible. This improves interoperability and readability. It's also to helpful to think in terms of APIs and modularity. It's great to have interdependence if you use versioning to avoid breaking changes.
Avoiding technical debt requires a commitment to very boring ideals that are a political liability because it causes your work to be slowed down for gains that are hard to observe and hard to communicate. However, the payoff is worth it, and it's possible to position your organization to be able to react quickly to a broad range of scenarios with templatized solutions.
The most common areas typically are data design issues where there is little ability to adapt or extend. Most every new project either is significant re-work, a stand-alone project with no leverage of prior work, or worst of all... no project at all as a result.