Innovation, Technical debt: How significant is it to the business?

Innovation is paramount for businesses to stay competitive and relevant in the market.

It allows companies to create new products, services, and processes to improve operations, increase efficiency, and meet evolving customer needs. Innovation can also lead to new revenue streams and help businesses grow and expand.

On the other hand, technical debt is the result of choosing a quicker or easier solution in the short term, which can lead to problems in the long term. Technical debt can accumulate over time, resulting in increased maintenance costs, decreased system performance, and reduced agility in responding to market changes. Technical debt can also negatively impact the customer experience, declining revenue and damaging the business's reputation.

Almost every business has some tech debt; the trick is identifying, valuing, and managing it.

Technical debt can cascade beyond development teams to the processes, platforms, and IT ops teams that drive core business operations, such as manufacturing, order fulfillment, shipping, and customer support.

Thus, while Innovation is necessary for growth and success, technical debt can hinder the business's ability to innovate and remain competitive.?

Addressing technical debt with?modernization and Innovation must go beyond just the "technology"?aspects, don't forget the?people?and?processes?too.?

Businesses must balance the need for Innovation with the need to manage technical debt and ensure that their technology infrastructure is agile and adaptable to meet changing business needs.

A few technical debt definitions that I resonate with; technical debt is:

• Any code that you've decided is a liability.
• Defined as the difference between what was promised and what was delivered, including the shortcuts to meet delivery deadlines. Therefore, understanding the distinction between desired architectural changes in the code base, technical debt, and new features is paramount.
• The cost of additional work results from choosing the quickest solution instead of the most effective one.
• Like financial debt, conceptually. With software, this generally means making coding or sub-optimal design decisions – or that we know will need to be addressed and updated – to get what we want or need into production sooner. While some debt is inevitable, leaders and teams must balance business goals, design, and implementation decisions.
• Described as the result of making decisions based on speed above all else. But there should be a balance between good choices and fast ones.
• All the work must be done to modernize the entire technology stack, including deferred maintenance or upgrades below the app layer, modifications to comply with data standards, and bespoke packaged software (that is, customizations that take software beyond the point where the original vendor can quickly provide ongoing support).

A common pain point found with many legacy systems and processes is that they are tied up with complicated interdependencies of tooling and policies. This dilemma is further complex because the longer you hold to those designs and implementations without making incremental strides to change, the larger the debt or effort.

As in our personal lives, there are always tradeoffs for when you want it versus when you need it. Incurring tech debt can result in adverse outcomes or be well worth it; finding a balance paired with informed decisions can make a big difference.

Martin Fowler's Technical Debt Quadrant?calls attention to asking whether a debt is prudent, coupled with the "deliberate/inadvertent" distinction, and uses this to create the Technical Debt Quadrant.

Consideration about how to apply the Technical Debt Quadrant in today's innovation initiatives:

• ?Reckless/ Deliberate Debt: In an innovation initiative, reckless or deliberate technical debt may arise when developers intentionally take shortcuts, make quick and dirty code changes to meet tight deadlines, or launch a new feature quickly. However, this type of technical debt can lead to long-term consequences that may harm the product's stability and scalability in the future.
• Prudent Debt: Prudent technical debt may be incurred when developers consciously decide to implement a feature or functionality that is not optimal but acceptable for the project's current needs. This debt may be necessary to launch or test a new feature or idea quickly. However, keeping track of such indebtedness and ensuring it's addressed in the future is essential.
• Inadvertent Debt: Inadvertent technical debt may occur when developers must be aware of the best practices, tools, or frameworks or make coding mistakes that lead to increased complexity or maintainability issues. To address this, it's essential to invest in training and provide developers with the necessary resources to avoid such problems.
• Prudent Inadvertent Debt: This type of technical debt occurs when developers are aware of the best practices, but due to unforeseen circumstances, they decide to increase complexity or maintainability issues. Addressing this type of debt as soon as possible is essential, as it can accumulate and become more challenging to manage.

By applying the Technical Debt Quadrant in innovation initiatives, you can help identify potential sources of technical debt and develop a plan to manage it, leading to the better product stability, scalability, and long-term success.

Organizations should be asking?

• How do we prevent taking on bad technical debt?
• How do we decide when it's good to accumulate technical debt?
• How should we manage existing technical debt?

Tags: #innovation #techdebt #agile #technologytransformation #leadership #CTO #CEO #CIO #CRO #DMWL