Three Steps to Business Innovation With Less Technical Debt

By Romi Stein, Co-Founder and CEO of OpenLegacy

The need to reduce technical debt has never been more pressing, especially as digital transformation accelerates and end user expectations increase. Following the start of the pandemic, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proclaimed that the world experienced two years of digital transformation in just two months. For some industries, the acceleration of digital innovation is even faster.

Consumers won’t wait for enterprises to get their act together – they expect real-time access to their accounts and data from their phones. They may very well leave for a competitor if they don’t get the features and functionality they want.

Organizations can no longer wait to take action. Instead of embedding new systems into their existing architecture (a costly and resource-intensive process), they need to reduce the pain points of technical debt while focusing on innovation. This may sound intimidating, but there are a few steps that businesses can take to lower the burden of technical debt, starting with a cloud-first approach.

Provide easy access to assets with a cloud-first approach

When people wish to access their favorite services, they don’t think about the backend technology – they simply want digital access. In the six months ending April 2021, McKinsey found the number of fully digital users grew by an average of 20% across all industries and regions. The cloud is crucial in this regard, enabling and enhancing digital access. But many enterprises are still struggling to keep up; they worry about a lack of innovation and flexibility that’s ultimately hindering their ability to build and deploy new services as quickly as customers demand.

To make matters worse, enterprises with legacy systems are likely to (and often do) get stuck waiting for the legacy teams to make assets available. While their hard work should not be ignored, businesses mustn’t overlook the busy work limiting their focus on higher-value tasks. The end result is an increase in technical debt, which is growing for many organizations.

A far better approach is to focus on the requirements to automate access to legacy data to ensure that it is readily available in a repository. This unburdens legacy teams, preventing them from having to carry out the time-consuming distractions that normally take up their day. More importantly, automation empowers legacy teams to create assets for cloud-native services, providing easy access to anyone who needs them.

Give digital teams the power to do more

When businesses need new digital services, they don’t expect their digital teams to be stymied by the search for assets that could solve their problems. They may not anticipate a delay as their digital teams struggle to figure out the benefits of a particular service, but it can happen. To make a real difference, digital teams need enablement – they need quick and easy access to generated modules that represent legacy logic and data.

More than that, they need the freedom to take a design-first approach; in other words, focus on developing the services before adding access to existing data and logic. This will empower them to design the services businesses (and their customers) need most and allow businesses to test their designs and ensure they satisfy requirements as they go. But while digital teams always take a cloud-first approach, this will only work if legacy assets are made to be cloud-first.

Use automation for faster results

In the corporate world, there’s no time for slow growth – businesses need to deliver results quickly and easily. This creates a tremendous amount of pressure, but the hyper-competitive market demands their dedication and determination. If businesses want to succeed, they’ll need to simplify their tasks down to what is necessary and automate the rest. Automation provides teams with the creative freedom to learn and adapt while innovating and building the critical features that are needed right now.

Overcome the burden of technical debt

Technical debt collects over time and will only increase if it is not addressed accordingly. This creates additional costs for businesses, limits their ability to innovate and needlessly reduces profits. The good news is businesses no longer need to suffer from technical debt. With a cloud and design-first approach, and the drive to attain results quickly and easily with the support of automation, businesses can finally overcome this problem.