By Sarah Nicastro, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Future of Field Service

Technical debt is an issue that is rapidly growing in importance – an issue that many businesses have avoided for far too long but must begin to reconcile. Gartner defines technical debt as “work that is ‘owed’ to an IT system when teams ‘borrow’ against long-term quality by making short-term sacrifices, taking short cuts, or using workarounds to meet delivery deadlines.”

MIT Sloan Management Review states that, “technical debt is an anchor, dragging down business leaders’ efforts to run a tight ship. The accumulated costs and effort from IT development shortcuts, outdated applications, and aging infrastructure sap a company’s ability to innovate, compete, and grow.” They point out that a degree of technical debt is inevitable, which I think is important to note – and possibly another challenge to overcome, in determining exactly when debt becomes “too much.”

Anecdotally, I’ve had numerous conversations with leaders who bemoan the situation of knowing their existing technology stack isn’t aligned with what their business needs. Many of these leaders feel they have no choice but to “make do” for now (and often now ends up being years).

While ripe with risk, technical debt exists for many reasons that are easy to understand – I’m sure each of you can imagine a handful of reasons the need to “make do” arises (and often persists). With the rapid evolution of the digital landscape that’s taken place over the last decade, many business – and even IT – leaders have been left, heads spinning, to digest the reality that world they once knew and loved – where systems could statically service their purpose for five, eight, even ten years – no longer exists.

The Realities of Today’s Digital Ecosystem

But not only has the reality of the digital ecosystem changed, the AI era that has taken the world by storm is creating a compound effect of technical debt. Technical debt forces a compromise of what’s most effective versus what “will do.” It means contorting what your business has become into the limitations of a system that was created for what your business was a handful of years ago, if not more. But moreover, if your business is inching by on a legacy foundation that should have been replaced by now, you are constricted in your ability to modernize at the pace innovation is demanding – you are not able to properly step into the AI era.

Now, many will try to force band-aids on the problem, versus addressing root cause – some of that is delusion, some born of necessity. But these band-aids are nothing more than more short-term solutions. To truly thrive not only in today’s landscape, but to be prepared for what comes next, you need to dig in and do the hard work of ensuring a strong, capable, modern foundation. Try as one might, there simply are no shortcuts or workarounds that will make an outdated platform fit for purpose in today’s fast-paced landscape – and layering even more passable-but-not-ideal solutions upon a shaky foundation is a recipe for disaster.

Meanwhile, the world isn’t waiting for you to catch up – your customers are already expecting you to somehow match the experiences they get from leading consumer brands. Many of your competitors are already delivering these experiences. Your employees are demanding a more modern employee value proposition, one that is nearly impossible to offer if their workdays are fraught with the burdens of outdated technology. And none of these variables are staying still, so it isn’t enough to catch up; you must determine how you modernize your systems, your processes, and your governance to be what today’s businesses have to be to succeed: agile.

U.S. Air Traffic Control Grapples with Technical Debt

A very real and especially scary example of technical debt is what’s currently happening as a result of the antiquated technology in use by the United States air traffic control. I flew through Newark earlier this month in the midst of its “multi-day meltdown,” and the far reaching and potentially detrimental impact of these issues weighed very heavy on my mind. While there are additional factors beyond the technology, the systems in place are decades old and rely on things like copper wires and floppy disks.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has spoken to the fact that outdated technology is a major factor in the issues affecting the nation's air traffic control systems, saying “What we have right now is the old-school flip phone. You can't update the flip phone.” In the same article, Paul Rinaldi, Vice President of Safety and Operations at Airlines for America and a former traffic controller, agrees with Duffy, referring to the existing system as “archaic.”

Duffy has proposed a four-year plan, estimated to cost more than 12.5 billion, to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system. He says in this article that “A lot of people have said: This problem is too complicated, too expensive, too hard.” All adjectives that those grappling with extreme technical debt have likely felt the weight of.

While many of the reasons technical debt persist can be valid, the risk of continuing to delay addressing it is simply too significant. This Gartner article lends some further insight on how technical debt hinders an organization and advice for how to manage it. And this MIT Sloan Management Review piece calls attention more specifically to how technical debt prevents organizations from deploying AI solutions that could reshape how they compete and what do to about it.

If you have a story to share about how your organization has handled the management or reduction of technical debt, I’d love to hear from you!