The Ugly Cousin Under the Stairs: Business Process Debt
For my favorite CIO.
Digital transformation is the big adventure for many companies these days—an exciting foray into new ways of working, organizing, and thinking. The promises of agility, efficiency, seamless customer experiences, and a competitive edge beckon like a North Star.
But every journey has its hurdles, and this one seems to stumble over the same familiar obstacle: technical debt. It’s the villain everyone loves to hate—visible, loudly complained about, and forever blamed for missed deadlines and crabby engineers.
And while we focus on untangling spaghetti code and upgrading crumbling legacy systems, another problem-child operates in the shadows; business process debt. This is the quiet, forgotten cousin under the stairs. It doesn’t crash your app or throw error messages, but it has an insidious way of suffocating progress, one redundant approval or bloated workflow at a time.
Fixing technical debt is an engineering challenge; fixing business process debt is a cultural reckoning, one that demands confronting the habits and silos that quietly hold progress hostage.
If technical debt is the pothole that rattles your spine, business process debt is the poorly designed intersection that stops traffic altogether—unnecessary signs, outdated and competing signals, and lanes that don’t connect. You can patch the potholes all you want, but until you fix the flow, you’re not going anywhere.
What Is Business Process Debt?
Business process debt is the buildup of outdated, overly complex, or inefficient workflows and practices that made sense at some point—often years ago—but no longer align with current goals or realities. Unlike technical debt, which demands attention with its bugs and crashes, business process debt works behind the scenes, quietly pouring sand into your gears.
It shows up as the team that requires five levels of approval for every change request, the 47-page deck to justifying a simple A/B test, the meeting that exists only because it always has. These processes may seem harmless—even strangely comforting—but much like their technical counterpart, they grow and metastasize over time, anchoring teams in place.
Technical and business process debt are born of the same short-term thinking: decisions made in haste, trade-offs that seemed reasonable at the time, or compromises that prioritized speed over sustainability. Both grow quietly in the background until their impact becomes impossible to ignore—often as a burden that cuts velocity to a crawl.
1. Accumulation Over Time
Debt doesn’t show up all at once. It sneaks in—a quick patch to get a product out the door, an extra step added to a process to address a compliance issue. Each decision seems minor, even logical. But over months and years, these small choices compound into massive inefficiencies.
2. Hidden Costs
At first, the costs are invisible: a day lost here, a frustrated employee there. But eventually, technical debt slows your ability to build, and business process debt slows your ability to decide what to build. Both drag on your team’s energy and momentum.
3. Drag on Speed
Adaptability is the lifeblood of growth, and both types of debt are speed gremlins. Technical debt creates fragile systems that resist change, while business process debt creates bottlenecks that make even small decisions feel like running a marathon in deep sand.
领英推荐
4. The Need for Intentional Management
Neither debt will resolve itself. Just as developers must refactor code and update systems, we need to reimagine workflows and rethink the cultural habits that sustain them. Ignoring either ensures you’ll be tripping over the same problems indefinitely.
Why Business Process Debt Is Harder to Spot
Unlike technical debt, which leaves a paper trail of bugs, crashes, and performance issues, business process debt is a master of disguise. It hides in:
Business process debt doesn’t show up in Jira tickets or error logs. It’s in the morale drained by yet another pointless meeting, the Rube Goldberg approval process, and the outdated workflows with endless steps. It’s the email chains no one wants to be on, the redundant oversight, and the silos that not only kill energy and momentum but keep teams from doing what they want to do most—ship.
The Real Cost of Business Process Debt
Anecdote time: In the early 2000s, a major telecom company (remember Nokia) lost a prime opportunity to lead the mobile internet revolution—not because it lacked the technology (remember Symbian OS?) but because its internal processes required a year-long approval cycle for any new initiative. By the time they launched, their competitors had captured the market and they became a cautionary tale.
Two Sides of the Same Coin, But Not the Same
While technical and business process debt share a common origin, they present unique challenges:
Business process debt is harder to tackle because it’s deeply human and cultural, unlike technical debt, which is tangible and straightforward by comparison. You can point to a broken system or outdated code and know exactly what needs fixing. Business process debt, on the other hand, hides in the habits people hold onto for comfort, the silos that define their sense of identity, and the unspoken rules that dictate how things get done. It takes more than just clearing bottlenecks or streamlining approvals; it means confronting the emotional and cultural reasons those bottlenecks and approvals exist in the first place. Fixing technical debt is an engineering challenge. Fixing business process debt is a cultural reckoning.
The Strategic Imperative
Transformation isn’t just upgrading your tools or tweaking the org chart; it’s upgrading how you think and work. Addressing technical debt without tackling business process debt is like tuning a race car engine with flat tires. It sounds great in the garage, but you won’t get very far.
To truly transform, we need to confront both types of debt. And remember, this isn’t just a technical exercise; it’s a cultural reset—a willingness to challenge what feels safe and familiar, replacing it with new norms that pave the way for sustainable growth and progress.
The cousin under the stairs may be ugly, but they’re family. Ignore them, and they’ll continue to haunt your every step. Just bring them into the light, and get on with the makeover already.
Experiential Event Activation Manager + Partnerships & Sponsorships (Director Level)
2 个月Alternative headline: The Dowager Countess. Why? One word: Entitlement. Nailed it with this article but surprised you didn’t go to your ultimate ace “headcount ROI”.