Technical Debt in the eyes of an enterprise architect

Practical business solutions with Enterprise Architecture

Some believe Enterprise Architecture is an ivory tower highly abstract discipline. I think I can convince some of those with a very cost-related, down-to-earth example - how we can use the power of EA to bear with the technical debt in large corporations.

What is technical debt and its impact on organizations

Technical debt has multiple definitions, but the simplest one is "a cost of remediation of the sub-optimal solution which has been chosen due to some reasons which contradict the established good practices, but are beneficial in a way, at least at the time of the decision". In other words: how much does the organisation need to pay LATER on a solution which is needed NOW despite some standards and principles broken. The cost of nonconformity.
The cost may be very local – we will need to rewrite whole application or its API part in one year for example. This is a problem usually found in every project regardless of the scale (I personally do not believe there is a project with NO debt whatsoever). But technical debt brings some specific problems when talking about huge, global-scale corporations.

Consequences of technical debt in large corporations

Let's look at some of those:

• Reduced agility and innovation
  Technical debt slows down the development process, making it difficult for large corporations to adapt quickly to market changes or implement new features. This lack of agility can lead to missed opportunities and reduced competitiveness in fast-moving industries.
• Increased operational costs
  As systems become more complex and intertwined due to technical debt, maintenance costs rise significantly. Companies often need to allocate more resources to keep legacy systems running, diverting funds from new initiatives or improvements.
• Higher risk of system failures
  Technical debt often results in fragile systems that are prone to bugs, security vulnerabilities, and outages. For global corporations, even minor downtime can result in substantial financial losses and damage to reputation, potentially affecting millions of customers worldwide.

Enterprise Architecture strategies for managing technical debt

EAs tend to view technical debt as a pervasive challenge that affects all layers of the enterprise architecture. They would approach the tech debt from a strategic, high-level perspective that considers the entire organization's technology landscape and its alignment with business goals.

Let's review the tools an EA utilises to address the problem in the scale:

• Portfolio Management
  Implement a comprehensive IT portfolio management approach. Regularly assess applications and infrastructure components for their business value, technical health, and alignment with future architecture.
• Technical Debt Quantification
  Develop metrics to quantify technical debt across all layers. This could include code quality metrics, system performance indicators, and measures of architectural complexity.
• Governance and Standards
  Establish strong governance processes and architectural standards to prevent the accumulation of new technical debt.
• Continuous Modernization
  Foster a culture of continuous improvement and modernization. Allocate a percentage of each project's budget to addressing technical debt.
• Skills and Knowledge Management
  Invest in training and knowledge management to ensure the team has the skills to work with both legacy and modern systems.
• Bi-modal IT
  Implement a bi-modal IT strategy, where one team focuses on maintaining stability in core systems while another drives innovation and modernization efforts.
• API Strategy
  Develop a comprehensive API strategy to encapsulate legacy systems, making them easier to integrate with and eventually replace.
• Cloud Migration
  Develop a cloud migration strategy that not only moves workloads to the cloud but also takes advantage of cloud-native architectures to address technical debt.

Some of the points are obvious, they are a scaled-up versions of their tactical counterparts. Some are however very EA-specific. In a next posts I will take a look at each of those, starting with one which is very close to my understanding of the core principle of the Architecture itself: Skills and Knowledge Management.

Author

Senior Architect at Sii Poland

Adam Kucharczyk

[email protected]

Senior Architect at Sii Poland

Adam Kucharczyk

[email protected]