In a world where digital proliferates and has made a fundamental change in many areas of business and society, a great number of organisations are embracing the opportunities it offers to drive benefits for customers and citizens. This can range from improving internal efficiency and delivering new services or products to entering new markets.

Embracing digital is a deep cultural journey involving the transformation of many aspects of an organisation. It impacts leadership, people, ways of working, tools and technology. One key element that must be embraced to achieve success is technical debt. Unless you are a startup, it is highly likely that you will have to face this — and of course, as a start up you will want to minimise its creation.

Technical debt as a term has been around for many, many years. I first encountered it in a book by Jim Highsmith on Agile Project Management. It resonated with me and my experience, and still does today.

What is Technical Debt?

I’d imagine that many readers will have their own working definition. It covers areas that are obvious to customers and users, such as defects, to other elements that can have a significant impact under the water line. These could be complexity, maintainability, unused or duplicate functionality, missing functionality and currency of version.

Why should you care?

For your digital transformation, the impact can be serious and devastating. Consider the following:

• Your speed of change during the transformation can be severely constrained by the complexity, which can mean change is limited by testing cycles or access to subject matter experts (usually few in number) who know how to make the changes in the first place. Unchecked, this will impact your speed of change ‘post transformation’, where the pace and adaptability you seek is compromised
• Technical debt can contribute to complex data or problems in accuracy, timelines or even access. Given that data fuels digital, this has direct consequences for the use of analytics, automation and the ability to understand what really matters to your customers
• Lack of currency (the version of your software or hardware) can mean you are missing out on capabilities that your digital ambitions will need. This can have cost, adaptability and complexity implications
• Technical debt can adversely impact the service to customers or colleagues. Given the high bar that is expected, this can damage trust in your organisation and retention and acquisition can suffer. Consider a mobile app: it’s only as good as the data it is accessing and the availability of its core applications
• Digital transformation can cause quick increases in the volume of customer requests. If your colleagues are hampered by technical debt, the consequence is a growth of backlogs, increasing time/cost to serve. The slick digital experience will be a distant memory at that point

A quick side note: it is important to remember that even if you are ‘cloud enabled’ technical debt likely still exists, even if you get advantages that ‘on premises’ doesn’t have.

Dealing with technical debt starts with awareness

As a profession many of us are aware of the problem of technical debt. A central issue is engaging with other business areas to develop awareness, knowledge and commitment to action. This requires building trust with other business leaders, which is definitely a journey for all involved. A couple of tips on this one: bring the issue alive in terms of tangible consequences and benefits to the organisation, not in technical terms; you can’t do everything, so be surgical in what to tackle and what can wait (or indeed, be left).

What next?

As always, there is no single answer to this. There are range of good options. We have embedded the concept in strategic processes (business strategy and planning), application portfolio management through to DevOps processes, and tooling and sprint quotas for flow teams (or squads, scrum teams — whichever nomenclature works for you).

Regardless, they need to target your specific problems and opportunities. It’s therefore important to consider where value can be achieved.

But what about digital transformation?

For any digital transformation (or indeed ongoing operations), understanding the type and level of technical debt is a must. Probably more important is to ascertain how the technical debt is trending over time, its implications for the customer experience and impact on pace and adaptability. These are key considerations that must sit at the heart of decision making. Your unique organisational circumstances dictate the specifics of what to measure and the necessary treatment strategies.