Pay Down Tech Debt While Investing in a Digital Future – Valutrics

If you’ve ever pondered a major remodel or a move after living in the same house for a few decades, you know the feeling of being overwhelmed. Where do you start? How long will it take? What will it look like when you’re done (will it ever be done)? Perhaps most importantly, what do I toss out immediately, what do I need to keep for the near term, and what is necessary for the day-to-day operations of the house?

These are the same feelings CIOs and CTOs face as they begin the journey of transforming their company to adopt a modern, agile digital technology strategy.

Most mature, successful organizations have experienced many technology-fueled paradigm shifts. What’s interesting about the shift we’re currently experiencing is that it is accelerating and becoming predictable. What I mean A company that has been successful for decades has a legacy estate that reflects the accomplishments and scars of navigating these prior waves of change in support of the evolution of their business – new products, channels, markets, partners, MA, etc. This footprint represents the totality of the technology decisions and debt amassed throughout their journey. 

The complexity of these journeys will be far greater than those of a digital native, born in the age of digital technologies and strategies that provide competitive advantage in the market. These technologies have been well chronicled: a flexible cloud-based computing platform, agile, iterative techniques for delivering new apps and services, powered The elements of a digital strategy and infrastructure are the same regardless of the age or type of business. Where you start this journey; what you intend to achieve; and how you balance the immediate and long-range needs of your business and customers is the challenge, and one that has taught us a great deal in the process of helping hundreds of companies across many industries.

Be clear on the reason and goals for your digital transition

Whether you’re a 50- or a 10-year old company, systemic change is costly in terms of capital, productivity, talent and lost market opportunity. Executives need to strike the right balance across the immediate needs of enabling systems of engagement and modernizing systems of record.

You need to do the math and make sure your digital transformation strategy adds up. You’re undertaking a digital transformation to gain a competitive advantage but if you run out of resources midway or the process unduly hampers your company, you need to consider a more moderate path.

There are three basic reasons companies embark on this journey:

1. Reduce costs. Maintaining legacy technology is increasingly expensive and reduces your resources available to move to a more efficient cloud-based infrastructure with applications delivered as a service.
2. Improve agility. Not only is technology changing rapidly, so are businesses. Market leaders can be disrupted and made irrelevant in a few years, so it is essential to have a technology organization that is agile with the capability to respond to shifting customer and market needs.
3. Accelerate innovation. Most organizations do not feel that innovation is embedded in their ways of working. The ability to innovate is more important to its survival and growth than ever. With the availability of increasingly inexpensive compute, storage, connectivity and sensor technologies, giants as well as start-ups are innovating at a rate we have never before experienced. A foundational element of an organization’s innovation strategy is the ability to exploit the vast investments of their ecosystem. Efficiently experimenting creating new products and services will require leveraging these investments in concert with an organization’s own internal creativity.

Have a holistic strategy

Too often the focus is on the technology, which in our experience is not the most challenging part of this journey. Developing a holistic strategy is the first step and should cover these key elements:

• Establish policy that directs future spending. To start, we deliberately direct the new on the new.  Embrace a strategy of establishing cloud-based, light-weight, modular, service-based architectures for all new development. Pivot from monolithic applications and embrace service-orientated platforms in an effort to assure new systems can quickly evolve to meet future needs over time. Take full advantage of the RD spent The advantages of modern digital infrastructures and technologies are profound. It’s a competitive imperative that companies must embrace no matter how overwhelming or painful. But it’s not simply a technology problem; it’s a journey to remake your business so it operates at an accelerated pace, with much greater market and customer insight and with the ability to respond and address these insights rapidly. 

  These are strategic and organizational issues that cannot be addressed

  John Crosthwait is Global Technology Consulting Lead for Accenture’s  Communications, Technology and Media Operating Group, looking after the Technology Advisory and Applications Architecture Advisory Business Practices.