Tackling Tech Debt: Advice For Midmarket IT Leaders

Midmarket IT leaders share their experiences with tech debt and one CEO shares his advice.

A top concern of CIOs and other tech leaders is dealing with “technical debt.”

According to Gartner, tech debt is “work that is ‘owed’ to an IT system when teams ‘borrow’ against long-term quality by making short-term sacrifices, taking short cuts, or using workarounds to meet delivery deadlines.” These debts can impact system performance, scalability or resilience.

Technical debt can refer to software – writing sloppy code to get a product out to market quickly only having to invest in fixing that code – or can refer to infrastructure – having to upgrade out-of-date hardware that has not been regularly patched, for example.

Technical debt costs organizations nearly $3 million a year, according to one report.

Several midmarket IT leaders spoke with MES Computing about their organization’s tech debt issues and how they are addressing them.

Booker "Tyrone" Showers is currently a partner at the Taliferro Group, which provides IT consulting and services. He has also held a variety of tech leadership roles including director of technology, cloud and infrastructure, at U.S. BioTek Laboratories.

Showers said he has encountered tech debt “when you’re working on a project, and you know there are some things that you need to do that you’re going to put off because you just can’t afford to do it. Now it’s too expensive or you don’t have the resource.”

He said that as an IT director, “we had this big project where we had to implement this whole medical system.”

“We didn't know anything about that, and we had to hire a consultant to help us with Medicaid and Medicare and all of the regulations. I guess that would be part of technical debt, too. I mean, we definitely went over budget with that.”

Brian Nguyen is an IT infrastructure manager and employee owner at SpawGlass – a full lifecycle construction services firm.

He spoke about the technical debt challenges his team have encountered.

“The technical debt we've faced is the needs of the company that come last minute then the projects and day-to-day work get pushed back,” Nguyen said.

He said they solved the issue by “stopping what we're doing to discuss lessons learned and implement measures to mitigate such actions. “

Joseph Hernandez, VP of technology at FEAM Aero, said, “we are currently knee deep in tackling the challenges associated with balancing the need to address technical debt while maintaining a focus on innovation and new technologies,” an experience likely shared by many IT executives in the midmarket.

Hernandez shared how his team is managing tech debt, saying their strategy is both “proactive and iterative, acknowledging the crucial role that legacy systems play while also recognizing the limits they impose.”

“We started by meeting with business stakeholders to identify the high-value areas where tech debt was creating friction,” Hernandez told MES Computing.

“Once we agreed on the areas of opportunity, we created a three-year roadmap driven by the business needs rather than technology trends. This allowed us to attain the buy-in from stakeholders necessary to drive change and look at us as partners instead of disruptors. We’re not only streamlining critical processes but also providing our teams with real-time insights that were previously locked away in siloed, outdated systems.,” he added.

Hernandez said that his team has two main objectives when dealing with tech debt: remove technical obstacles and equip the team with tools that boost efficiency.

“Technical debt is not merely about replacing old systems – it's about building a technology ecosystem that can adapt and scale with our business needs,” he said.

Josh Dinneen, CEO at Blue Mantis, an IT services company, said his company helps customers with their tech debt and described how issues with tech debt can arise.

“[Tech] debt comes in a lot of different forms. It could be antiquated processes and technology in the business, which is pretty easy to figure out. I have systems that are 15 years old, that haven’t been patched. I’m running a version of an ERP that’s old, I can’t update it anymore. It’s not supported but I still run it.

I’ve compartmentalized it in the environment, but we're still leveraging it as part of our core business function. How do I modernize that piece?” Dinneen said.

“We went through that. We understand that. We did that with our CRM, we did that with our ServiceNow, NetSuite, Microsoft. We modernized. We had a lot of tech debt around ... some homegrown systems ... FileMaker, some other things that we had to really get out.”

Dinneen said that Blue Mantis’ experiences with its own tech debt helped the company better assist their customers with their own debt issues.

“We have a lot of customers We have customers that are still on Lotus Notes ... we're helping customers modernize.”

Tech debt, Dinneen said, also comes in the form of applications and code.

“There are a lot of flavors of tech debt. It’s not just the technology.”

He said that when assisting customers with tech debt, his team asks several questions that IT leaders looking to manage their tech debt can also ask themselves.

“How do you optimize overall? What’s the outcome you're trying to achieve? What are the business requirements and how do you support that visibility?” he said.

Dinneen said that asset management is a huge part of controlling tech debt because it is important to have a “real-time understanding of where your assets are and why you have them.”

He also offered some final advice for IT leaders tackling tech debt.

“It’s all about change management. You can’t do everything all at once. I give so much credit to my team, the whole team at Blue Mantis for adapting to change.”

He said reigning in tech debt and modernizing can be “painful at times,” but that IT teams should pace themselves through the process and realize “you can’t throw too much at people all at the same time.”