Technical Debt: One More [Day]

Southwest Airlines recently acknowledged challenges with antiquated technology systems that caused the massive inability to operate the business and to serve customers adequately. Southwest’s technical challenges are a high-profile example of technical debt catching up to and overtaking a company’s ability to perform essential functions. Southwest appears to have kicked the proverbial can down the road until the road ended at a cliff. Southwest is one of many in its struggle to prevent and overcome technical debt.

Technical debt begins the moment a technical system is created and implemented. Every company leveraging software and systems has some technical debt as part of ownership and use. The problem isn’t the existence of technical debt because technical debt is omnipresent. The situation in Southwest’s case and others is the need for more attention and intention to acknowledge, understand, and mitigate technical debt to an acceptable level.

I chose the title for this post because too many organizations think they can squeeze one more day out of technical systems before suffering significant negative consequences. The one more day inevitably becomes one more week, one more quarter, one more year, and then sometimes one more decade. I’m not saying change isn’t hard and that decisions around sunsetting existing applications and systems are easy, and it’s not. However, it is leadership malpractice to keep kicking the proverbial can down the road hoping against hope that this isn’t going to be the day that the welds break and things start to fall apart.

Technical debt becomes consequential when any of the following occurs:

• Unsupported technology — This should go without mentioning, but sadly that’s not the case. Many organizations will push the limits of applications and systems until they have no choice but to upgrade or migrate away from them. No leader wants to hear or be confronted with the end of life, but it happens daily.
• Unstable systems — The proverbial house of cards. System and application architecture matter greatly, and leaders are reminded of this too often after the fact. When architecture is undervalued and under-appreciated, there is a price to pay at some point. The instability of technology systems might not appear initially. Still, it will; when it does, it’s not just a matter of wedging inappropriate architecture. It typically means re-architecting and re-engineering.
• Lack of scalability — Scalability can undoubtedly be impacted by poor architecture. Still, even well-architected applications must run on appropriate infrastructure to perform adequately. The number of users, the volume of data, the type of transactions, and more factor into having the proper infrastructure to provide a secure and usable product.
• Lack of extendability — Applications on an island can cause as much technical debt as anything else. The ability for an application to easily, quickly, and securely exchange data and content with other applications is no longer a nice to have. APIs aren’t new, and the need for an application to extend beyond its digital presence isn’t new. However, we still have too many situations where a company is limited by an application’s inability to transact with other applications without manual intervention.
• Insecure — Technical systems can quickly compound technical debt if they become vulnerable to security comprises. Security technical debt is what hackers count on when they probe and run bots looking for vulnerabilities. Systems and applications that are insecure also unknowingly add technical security debt to the systems and applications they integrate with.
• Operational misalignment — As the operational needs of an organization, so does an organization’s technology. Technology should never wag the dog. The operational needs should always drive the technological evolution of a business. When a company is forced to operate in alignment with technology, technology is no longer serving the company. Systems that remain in place because there needs to be more leadership courage to change the systems to evolve with the operational needs of the business will ultimately prevent the company from operating as it needs to be competitive.
• Strategy misalignment — The next level up from operational misalignment between technology and an organization is strategic misalignment. Digital transformation is a buzzphrase these days. What is digital transformation for a company? It aligns a company’s digital capabilities with its strategy for competitiveness and growth. In most cases, companies are not in front of digital transformation; they are behind. In most cases, digital transformation is another softer way of saying technical debt. The digital transformation type of technical debt doesn’t mean that a company’s applications and systems aren’t serving the company well today. Still, they need to be more capable of being the applications and systems the company will need in the future. As soon as a company’s technical capability is limiting a company’s ability to pursue a winning strategy, the company has technical debt.

Pressure on budgets and competing interests cause companies to try to get one more year out of legacy technology that has known issues. Inevitably the one more year happens repeatedly, with leaders hoping they can get through yet another year without doing anything. Technical debt can sometimes be surprising and catch company leaders off guard, but this is rare. In most cases, technical debt is known, ignored, acknowledged, and deprioritized. Technical debt competes with every other initiative in a company for attention, money, and energy. Invest in a new marketing campaign or re-architect a system? Expand the sales team, or upgrade the code of an application? Open new locations, or make a product better able to integrate to reduce manual work?

Technical debt becomes an anchor that initially places a small amount of drag on a company’s ability to execute, with the amount of drag increasing over time. Imagine paddling a kayak on smooth water with little resistance and effort. Now imagine the water has gotten choppy, causing you to paddle more vigorously. Imagine an anchor attached to the kayak increasing in weight with every few hundred yards you paddle. This is technical debt that is left unchecked. Eventually, it will be impossible to paddle the kayak, causing it to become immobile and ultimately sinking the kayak.

Company leaders have a challenge in figuring out when and how to address technical debt responsibly. Software and systems vendors will push for constant upgrades, updates, and enhancements that, in many cases, help the vendors far more than the customers. The barrage of recommendations from vendors needs to be filtered and assessed for timeliness and value by companies to ensure they aren’t buying for the benefit of the vendors’ bottom line and not their operations. With that said, company leaders should continually evaluate the veracity of a technology vendor’s recommendations on updating and upgrading, as some of the recommendations are in the customers’ best interest.

Technical debt is ubiquitous. There is no getting around it. The challenge for leaders isn’t avoiding technical debt because that is impossible. The challenge for leaders around technical debt is how much is appropriate and tenable before it becomes a negative factor in an organization. Leaders must be honest about the realities of their technical debt and have the courage to take action on it while it remains innocuous. Once technical debt crosses the threshold of harmless to harmful, a plan must be implemented to remedy it and executed with intention and discipline. Technical debt allowed to grow in harm and risk ultimately proves so painful that the procrastination of addressing it will be embarrassing and regretful.