What is Technical Debt (And How Do You Get Out of It)?

Technical debt is the ever-stacking cost of suboptimal infrastructure resources for your organization. Whether it’s code, design, or system decisions that require refactoring, maintenance, or rework in the future, this debt adds up until it can become a burden for your entire organization.

If you find yourself “paying interest payments” on your technical debt with slow networks, poor scaling processes, and legacy infrastructure, it might be time for a self-evaluation. How can you reoptimize your environment—and how can you “pay” your way out of technical debt?

How Organizations Get Themselves into Technical Debt

Tech debt adds up over time when you make short-sighted decisions without thinking about the long-term health of your systems, including:

• Pushing speed over quality, which can result in short-term objectives being achieved without long-term planning

• Lack of experienced oversight because it feels too costly or burdensome in the moment and it’s just faster to get it done

• Relying on legacy structure and codebase simply because it’s worked in the past
• Lack of testing, which can leave you unprepared for outages and downtime

The insidious part about technical debt? It’s hard to see it as it stacks. But collectively, over time, the debt can impact the quality of your entire technical environment. It can slow you down, block the development process for new features of your business offerings, and even extend the length of your downtimes until technical debt starts leaking onto the bottom line.

The Seven Types of Tech Debt

Not all “tech debt” is the same. Consider if one of the following types strikes you as a familiar examination of your organization’s current IT issues:

• Design/architecture: Slow and less-impactful innovation, no competitive advantage. With improved architecture, you could re-factor and re-platform to foster more product innovation.
• Implementation: Legacy software and infrastructure keeps you slow. With better implementation, you can “future-proof” your technology stack and mitigate future business risks.
• Requirements: Weak digital experiences, slow organizational velocity, leading to higher costs and poorer digital experiences
• Testing: No manual testing—or testing at all—thanks to other initiatives. But is there a way to manage testing or better yet have someone do it for you for less?
• Deployment: No DevOps or CI/CD to keep things under control. Without tech debt, you can leverage DevOps and CI/CD more effectively.
• Documentation: Lack of, or even outdated, documentation. Once out of tech debt, you’ll find it easier to keep current and accurate technical documentation.
• Social: Your business and IT rarely feel aligned in terms of needs and capabilities. But without tech debt, you’ll have tighter technology and strategy alignment between teams.

In short, every aspect of your business’s organization pays some part of the tech debt, even if they don’t necessarily “feel” it. This leads to the next question: what can you do about tech debt?

Seven Steps to Get Out of Tech Debt

1. Start with assessment and discovery. What can you do to meet your business’s current requirements? This is how you’ll learn about the “weak digital experiences” that have been holding you back.
2. Review your design and architectural practices. Are there ways to reduce your business risk and manage these practices as a “lifecycle” with more predictable technical requirements? 
3. Review the technical environment. Update your infrastructure and applications whenever possible and relevant. This will give you an immediate boost and cut back your tech debt quickly.
4. Examine your testing practices. Look for opportunities to automate—and if you don’t see them, ask if there are systems you can improve to make automation possible.
5. Investigate your current processes for deployment. Are you leveraging DevOps? CI/CD? How can you involve them in new processes to make rollouts and deployment much easier?
6. Review your documentation. Sometimes, that may mean looking for documentation you don’t have, which will require that you install a process for starting documentation—beginning today.
7. Conduct stakeholder interviews. This is when you’ll discover if business and IT aren’t in alignment or if they feel siloed off from one another. Ask about the problems that get in the way, and look for systems and solutions that can potentially offer a remedy.

Digging Yourself Out of Tech Debt with Comport

Sound complicated? It is, but that’s not a reason to worry. Comport, for example, comes alongside your organization to coach, mentor, and develop your process for getting out of tech debt. 

Our process is simple: We conduct a technical debt assessment to evaluate the infrastructure and applications in place at your organization, with an eye on any modernization we can conduct to ensure your cloud systems are in a much better place. We then conduct a cost optimization analysis to ensure these enhanced digital experiences don’t put you in financial debt to pay off your technical debt. 

Finally, we evaluate the enhancement of your organizational velocity. This is when we ask a critical question: have these improvements made your organization run better? A lot of questions go into that. Does your company run more smoothly? Have these changes made product rollouts more reliable? 

Once we’ve engaged you to help rescue you from technical debt, we can reduce operational expenses. New, modern systems with a strategic approach can help you deliver seamless, intuitive digital interactions across all customer touchpoints. Thanks to simplified time-to-market and improved development agility, your organizational velocity should be faster.

Technical debt can slow you down the same way financial debt can: it can weigh on everything. Fortunately, there are ways to get out of this technical debt—and they don’t have to be overly complicated or cumbersome.

Reach out to Comport to reduce your technical debt—and start streamlining your business today.