Anyone who works in IT will have stories of technical debt – those times you have to tape software together to get it released by the deadline, or a cheap solution staves off a more costly overhaul of old systems.
No matter how far you push it down the line, though, everyone has to pay up eventually. Ignoring technical debt only compounds the eventual problem of addressing it and IT teams around the world are saddled with technical debt that bites into their yearly budget.
In this episode, Rory is joined by Karen Worstell, senior cyber strategist at VMware to explore the impacts of technical debt and what can be done to address it.
Highlights
“In my role as a CISO in the role of IT risk management many years ago, when we tried to roll out a new CRM implementation … the lack of understanding of the debt that had accumulated in the environment made that implementation fail, and it was a significant cost to the company. I think they lost about $350 million in one calendar quarter.”
“Technical debt is a defect, if you think about it in terms of six sigma and quality management. I would say having your IT operating, understanding very clearly that there is a tolerance level that the IT organization should operate within… there's always going to be a certain amount of technical debt, but I need to set my parameters for what that manageable number is, how to quantify that.”
“In my observation over the years has been that there's a strong tendency for executive management to assume that people are doing the right thing. And in my role as an IT risk manager, I frequently had the very distinct displeasure of being the one to tell them that they're not.”
Footnotes
- What is technical debt and how can businesses tackle it?
- Zscaler CEO: Successful digital transformation requires simplistic thinking
- IT teams need to optimize and tackle tech debt ahead of economic downturn warn analysts
- Breaking technical debt’s vicious cycle to modernize your business
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