Technical Debt vs. Sweating the Assets
The age old question for Information Technology Executives – what is the right balance between the two?
Before getting too far into the discussion, I’d like to identify several areas of Technical Debt. There is Software Technical Debt – this can be custom developed software, vendor supplied software or a combination of both. Another category is Infrastructure Technical Debt – the physical side of your technical organization which includes your server farms, networks, desktops, etc. In this article I will be addressing both of these categories.
Clearly from the CFOs perspective, they will want to leverage all investments as far as possible however as an Information Technology leader it is your responsibility to both educate and monitor the market forces that affect these critical risks. More about that latter.
Through the course of my career I have run into this issue too many times to count. While some of the companies I worked with had an aggressive plan to limit technical debt, too many had “taken their eye off the ball” and ended up in situations of extreme risk. These risks can take on one or several of the following key challenges:
1) Staffing – are the products and languages even remotely attractive to maintain a healthy pool of candidates? Are they too cutting edge? Is your organization the last known user of APL? Windows XP? VMS?
2) Vendor Support – are the products and services deployed within your organization still supported? At end of life? Near end of life? Where does your technical portfolio (software and infrastructure) fall against your vendors product roadmaps?
3) Tribal Knowledge – have the products and services deployed been extensively customized AND is that knowledge either readily extractable or still in-house? Can you get to your critical business logical?
Whether you inherited the situation or created it the time is now to have active educational discussions with your business partners because this is a shared responsibility of the organization. This should be part of all project level bartering and all annual budget discussions. At the project level, you can refactor out near term technical debt and also aggressively manage your technical product portfolio from year to year. At the annual budget sessions, you should be prepared to discuss the areas that are going to face some challenges and make sure your business partners understand the results of your collective decisions.
Failure to do so will bring the acronym CIO actively into play – Career Is Over.
