Tech Debt Undermines Competitive Edge

June 2022 麦肯锡 research reveals that nearly 70% of top economic performers distinguish themselves from competitors through proprietary software, with a third directly monetizing it.

?In today's landscape, every company strives to adopt the latest technologies, processes and trends, aiming to attract top talent and achieve high levels of innovation and persist those levels in a bid to remain competitive.?

However, the reality is often a stark contrast. Many companies fail to properly integrate technology due to fear of investment, transformative risks and sheer complexity , leading to superficial customer-facing solutions like online shops and apps. Underneath the half reasonable facade of a web app experience, lies technical debt that manifests through a creaking airline booking system, a dusty application that predates the car it wheels through on the production line by some 20 years! It’s pervasive, abundant and a continuum.

Just this last week at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Exec Leaders Summit London, I attended quite an inspiring and very relevant talk from Azeem Azhar about how change is a constant, and how organizations must strive to adapt and keep up with technology evolution more than ever before, the race to adopt and become an AI enabled organization is upon us.

Organizations often fail to pay back technical debt, who's efforts mimic technological advancement without delivering substantial benefits. Instead of strategic, long-term tech investments, firms frequently misallocate resources, adding superficial, new technologies and often failing to go back to past investments or existing software as they become outdated systems.?

This results in complex, unwieldy tech stacks and necessitates increased engineering staff, driving up costs and leading to systems fraught with stability, security, and scalability issues, ultimately diminishing any competitive advantage and preventing IT from being as agile and nimble as it needs to stay ahead. Engineering organizations often find themselves in a dysfunctional state. Supporting ageing systems, dependencies, code and infrastructure becomes a significant risk as knowledge starts to wane over time, supportability becomes strained, as does performance and the ability to harness contemporary technologies and methods, such as modern deployment and cloud-native initiatives. These challenges are equally felt on the innovative side as the abundance of tooling and toil posed on engineers leads to a lack of efficiency, long wait times and complexity. However, there could be an alternative approach that provides a real resolution. While DevOps has revolutionized software development and deployment, the increasing complexity and volume of modern cloud-native technologies has placed unprecedented pressure on teams. As organizations scale, the limitations and inefficiencies of current DevOps approaches have become more evident.

One major challenge is the need for more automation in end-to-end DevOps processes. Dynatrace's recent study on DevOps automation revealed that only 56% of these processes are automated, leading to slower delivery times and reduced efficiency. The average of nine manual interventions in a typical developer pipeline, including approvals and security checks, further compounds this. These lead to prolonged resolution times and can significantly affect the organization’s bottom line and customer satisfaction.

Try adding transformational and modernization tasks and these challenging attributes are only accentuated. Complexity, time, cost and risk are all elevated, in some cases to campaign stalling levels. In another recent study, the Developer Coefficient Research by Gartner and Stripe . It was found that 33% of an engineers time is spent trying to maintain software. Gartner separately report that up to 40% of an enterprise’s budget is spent on these painstaking, mundane but critically required tasks. There are few core reasons for this. The first is not knowing enough about existing software, it’s construct, requirements, the infrastructure it depends on, its internal dependencies, complex, antiquated code and what needs modernization and how!? The second is on the broader development and deployment side, and this applies not just to legacy applications, but any new products or services, this is toolchain complexity.?

The DevOps ecosystem’s abundance of tools and technologies can lead to a fragmented environment that’s difficult to manage. This complexity makes it challenging for teams to integrate and maintain a cohesive DevOps workflow, leading to inefficiencies and reduced productivity.

The third is siloed teams. Silos can impede collaboration and communication, which are critical for successful DevOps adoption. Siloed teams often lack visibility into each other’s processes, leading to misalignments, duplicated efforts and slower problem-resolution times, a general lack of standardization in terms of processes and configuration.

Is Platform Engineering the way to handle these challenges?

The software and cloud-native industry faces a critical challenge: how to regain control over sprawling, inefficient toolchains and simplify the complexity that engineers confront to stay productive. The solution is increasingly clear, a systematic way of applying contemporary technology and evolving applications with minimal complexity and Platform Engineering.

?This approach, used by leading tech companies like Google, Airbnb, and Spotify, enables the efficient integration of hundreds to thousands of developers into complex systems while reducing their cognitive load and empowering them to perform tasks around writing their code so that they can ship faster, breeze through complexity whilst allowing the organization as a whole to have standards and consistent experience across the whole end-to-end software lifecycle.

Originally adopted by top tech firms, platform engineering is now spreading to a wide array of companies across various sectors, including those less traditionally associated with technology. This method's potential to transform businesses into tech-centric organizations is why Gartner identified platform engineering as a Top Strategic Technology Trend for 2023 and 2024, predicting that by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will have dedicated platform engineering teams. Platform engineering is a modern approach to DevOps, a logical extension of DevOps, to be more precise, and designed to work with existing DevOps principles while alleviating the associated cognitive load. Platform engineers streamline standard DevOps activities by building an internal developer platform (IDP) that offers a single application development and deployment toolkit.

What is Platform Engineering??

A strategic extension of DevOps, platform engineering addresses traditional manual approaches’ shortcomings, drawbacks and constraints. It automates development and deployment pipelines, streamlining them for heightened efficiency and effectiveness, surpassing conventional limitations. Adopting a platform engineering culture enables businesses to excel in the digital transformation age by allowing them to simplify and improve the effectiveness of tasks handled by DevOps.?

In the new tech era, one where the exponential rate of new technology is accelerating faster than ever, we must empower developers to be able to build and service their application needs as self-service, improve their efficiency, reduce the toil and complexity, all whilst ensuring that the whole PaaS like experience is governed and in-line with the conditions and behaviours that platform teams define.

Where does AppFactor fit in?

AppFactor is an app-centric platform engineering solution with a unique and significant difference from any other solution. It’s designed to enhance developer efficiency and innovation and features an AI-powered toolchain that automates software maintenance and modernization, traditionally a manual and time-consuming process, especially for large enterprises with outdated code bases.?

By automating repetitive tasks and abstracting the complexities of infrastructure choices, architecture patterns, modification and migration of code. AppFactor allows developers to focus on core application development without being encumbered by technical details. The product's approach emphasizes continuous modernization and optimization with a particular focus across all supporting pillars where tech debt compounds over time -? infrastructure, architecture, code and dependencies.

AppFactor helps? to eliminate technical debt by seamlessly integrating the latest cloud services, harnessing new runtimes, frameworks and delivery techniques. AppFactor equips teams with the tools to innovate swiftly, adapt to changes seamlessly, and modernize heritage systems for contemporary delivery, ensuring a cohesive workflow throughout the lifecycle.

Next Steps

Want to reclaim the 33% of time and 40% of budget lost to maintenance? Transform your development process with AppFactor. Streamline maintenance, modernization and optimize application development.?

Visit our website www.appfactor.io to explore our solutions and schedule a demo.

With AppFactor, your IT team can stay competitive, easily and reliably harnessing the latest technology for enterprise applications, both today and in the future.

Make the smart move with AppFactor—where innovation meets efficiency.