Why Does Technical Debt Exist - A Story
Technical debt exists because people are lazy and are resistant to change, right?
Scenario: The enterprise architect has identified the Public Cloud for hosting all applications for the Pharmaceutical company she serves.
Engineering begins the process of assessing the migration plan for each app. The ERP system is the first target as it’s the most extensive and complex application. In performing due diligence, engineering discovers the company saves $1,000,000/year on operational costs simply by performing a lift and shift to the public cloud. In addition, the business expects increased agility by reducing the overhead to provision QA and Dev environments.
Win/Win for everyone, right? No need to stay on the bare metal instances in the pharma’s on-premises data center. That is until you reach manufacturing compliance. The ERP system is used in the manufacturing process. Therefore it’s in scope for the U.S. Federal Drug Administration regulators. The company must recertify the system if the ERP system is re-platformed to the public cloud.
IT has 100 people working on ERP and spends $10M/year on maintaining the system. However, manufacturing is the lifeline of the $1B/year business. So taking resources away from the “business” to save IT $1M/year isn’t the priority.
But the savings! And we avoid incurring technical debt!
If you are the CTO/EA for this business, what’s next?