Most of the tech debt I deal with comes from projects that are declared a success by management before they are actually done, and no one is officially responsible for maintaining it. The teams are told to move on to something new, the old thing never gets fully finished and dies a long slow death, because no one wants to officially say that it was a waste of time and should be shut down.
Do this repeatedly and it really starts to add up. At times we are running 3-4 platforms for the same thing. Two are legacy with one or two critical things still running on them with no support. One is “production”, but no one is actually paying much attention to it. And one is in development or pilot… it’s all anyone can talk about, but it doesn’t actually work. While that in-house developed pilot is going on, we’ll also be told to do a POC with a tool from some outside vendors.
AI won’t solve political and bureaucratic problems. If anything, it will make it worse, as turnover to new products is expected faster.
To get rid of technical debt, an organization needs to focus. Which means saying “no” to most things, instead of trying to do it all.
Do this repeatedly and it really starts to add up. At times we are running 3-4 platforms for the same thing. Two are legacy with one or two critical things still running on them with no support. One is “production”, but no one is actually paying much attention to it. And one is in development or pilot… it’s all anyone can talk about, but it doesn’t actually work. While that in-house developed pilot is going on, we’ll also be told to do a POC with a tool from some outside vendors.
AI won’t solve political and bureaucratic problems. If anything, it will make it worse, as turnover to new products is expected faster.
To get rid of technical debt, an organization needs to focus. Which means saying “no” to most things, instead of trying to do it all.