Your Technical Debt Is Calling—Are You Going To Answer?

Every organization carries some level of technical debt. It accumulates quietly over the years, like a ticking time bomb. An outdated system integration here, a custom field over there and some workflow someone built years ago that no one remembers why, but everyone thinks it is important. One day, you wake up and discover that what once felt like band-aid solutions has turned into a full-blown operational liability. Technical debt rarely raises its hand and makes itself known. It slowly builds in your organization and results in small inefficiencies, small downtime windows and small frustrations until the small inefficiencies start to cost millions to support.

Technical debt isn’t inherently bad. In fact, in fast-moving organizations, it’s often unavoidable. But unmanaged technical debt can become dangerous. It starts slowing upgrades, limiting scalability, increasing support costs and ultimately diminishing the return on your technology investments. As I’ve experienced in my own work, the moment technical debt begins to impact data quality, system performance or business workflows, it stops being a minor nuisance and becomes a real constraint.

Houston, we have a problem.

You will usually notice the symptoms before you understand the cause. In my case, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system I inherited had not been updated in nearly a decade. On the surface, it worked with the right brute force, but the cracks were everywhere: slow system performance, workflows to nowhere, data inaccuracies and hours wasted on manual workarounds. Finance and manufacturing teams experienced daily bottlenecks and shipping would continually fall behind. Every night I waited for a dreaded email saying a batch process had failed without clear explanation. Even simple tasks such as logging in took so long that I could have a coffee while I was waiting.

When we decided to dig deeper into the situation, we found exactly what I was anticipating. A system that was left to age without proper governance, controls and updates. Unlike a nice Bordeaux, this did not age well and left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth. The more we dove into the system, the clearer it was that the system wasn’t broken because of one big issue; it was compromised by years of small decisions that built up into the failing system we now faced.

You may be experiencing the same signals today: slow page loads, reliance on Excel for simple reporting, manual data entry, “swivel chair” processes where teams hop between systems to complete a task, complaints about missing automation, and the continual triage of issues. These are not minor issues, but warning signs that your technical debt is about to explode.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Technical debt doesn’t just frustrate employees; it undermines the organization’s ability to scale, execute and innovate, and it hinders competitive advantages. When systems are outdated, over-customized or structurally flawed, they generate more support tickets, requiring increased resources and leading to increased costs. They also contribute to poor data quality, making reporting and decision-making more difficult.

In today’s interconnected digital world, the stakes are even higher. Outdated systems create security issues with the potential of old code being exploited. Unsupported coding can open doors for a data breach. “Fix it later” quickly becomes “why didn’t we fix this when we had the chance?” Technical debt isn’t just a technical concern anymore—it’s a cybersecurity and compliance risk.

Finding The Source Of Your Technical Debt

Uncovering technical debt requires more than just poking around the systems and hoping to stumble across an aha moment. It requires understanding how users interact with the system. My first step is to always talk to the power users of the system, those who are most familiar with the tools. More often than not, they are well-versed in the pains of technical debt and can describe the current workarounds, lagging processes, inefficiencies and, if you're lucky, otherwise unknown issues.

From there, examine:

• Integration And Service Logs: Where are failures happening? What is the frequency of the failures? Are they occurring with any pattern?
• Customizations: Which systems, forms, fields or workflows are no longer used in the system or are used with no understanding of why?
• System Components: Which modules are unsupported or blocking upgrades?

Once you understand the scope, you can begin making strategic decisions.

Read the full article published by Forbes Business Council.