In today’s fast-paced digital and business environments, organizations frequently make trade-offs between delivering solutions quickly and maintaining long-term technical sustainability. These shortcuts, often taken to accelerate time to market, result in technical debt – essentially, unresolved issues that hinder the long-term functionality of a system.
Research shows that 47% of applications are outdated, and technical debt can consume up to 40% of IT budgets, limiting innovation and growth. As the complexity of the technology landscape increases, managing technical debt has become a critical priority for IT leaders, with 46% of executives reporting it hinders their ability to transform and grow. Without proper oversight, technical debt leads to rising costs, increased security vulnerabilities, and limited business agility.
The role of data orchestration in technical debt management
Managing technical debt effectively requires a comprehensive view of all systems and their dependencies. Data orchestration plays a critical role in this process by bringing together siloed information from various sources – such as CMDBs, application lifecycle management tools, and code-quality analyzers – to provide a unified view of the technology stack.
Data orchestration helps businesses capture, structure, and relate data from across their IT environments. By leveraging this consolidated data, organizations can surface key insights and make informed decisions about which systems to update, refactor, or retire.
Challenges in managing technical debt
Technical debt management involves several stages, each with its own challenges:
- Identify and capture: Visibility is often a major issue. Incomplete data, lack of integration between systems, and the need for manual updates make it difficult to capture an accurate picture of the current technical debt landscape.
- Evaluate: Once technical debt is identified, the next challenge is evaluating its impact. Many organizations struggle with inconsistent processes for assessing the cost, risks, and strategic implications of technical debt. Without this understanding, IT leaders find it difficult to prioritize actions effectively.
- Inform and transform: Limited insights into how technical debt affects critical assets and overall business strategy often lead to incomplete transformation efforts. Stakeholders need clear data on how technical debt impacts long-term goals and budgets.
- Monitor: After capturing technical debt, the challenge is maintaining oversight and ensuring that the organization’s debt level is reviewed regularly. A lack of consistent follow-up and ownership can result in technical debt creeping back into the system over time.
How OrbusInfinity Flow solves technical debt challenges
Our native integration platform as a service (iPaaS) OrbusInfinity Flow streamlines the entire technical debt management process through its comprehensive data orchestration, automation, and workflow management capabilities. Here’s how:
- Identify and capture: OrbusInfinity Flow connects seamlessly with over 150 enterprise applications, including common CMDBs, enabling organizations to gather complete data about technology lifecycles and dependencies. Low-code integrations allow IT teams to quickly feed data from various monitoring tools, providing the visibility needed to capture technical debt accurately.
- Evaluate: With pre-built automations, OrbusInfinity Flow calculates scores and impacts, including aggregated costs and technical obsolescence. This automatic evaluation enables IT leaders to assess the magnitude of technical debt and prioritize actions effectively.
- Inform and transform: The platform surfaces critical strategic initiatives and assets at risk, leveraging AI-generated mappings to show the enterprise-wide impact of technical debt. This gives stakeholders clear insights into where action is most needed.
- Monitor: OrbusInfinity Flow’s tailored workflows ensure that technical debt is consistently monitored. Automated notifications and annual attestations keep stakeholders engaged, while Gartner’s PAID framework helps assess and prioritize technical debt over time.
Managing technical debt is no longer optional – it’s a critical part of maintaining business agility and controlling costs. OrbusInfinity Flow simplifies technical debt management by providing the data visibility, automation, and workflows needed to stay on top of evolving systems.
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