Looking across the Federal government data center communities, the constant and long-malignant threat of incurable technical debt (TD) is pervasive – where short term planning and siloed IT design leads to procurement of COTS and IT services that quickly become obsolescent and drive sustainment costs through the roof. This leads to the inability of agencies to allocate new revenues, new budget, or cost savings to meet new mission demands or leverage significant commercial technology advances.
Modeling, monitoring, and treating TD as a virus is an appropriate response – though requires as much continual input from the operations and sustainment teams, as from the strategy and designers, i.e. a “whole-of-enterprise” approach. There’s no herd-immunity to this disease, this more and more-rapidly mutating and spreading pandemic. There is, however, persistent, expert commercial experience with it, fighting this contagion and its attack vectors, for leverage by public-sector IT programs.
While this original article was written focusing on very large IT environments, technical debt can quickly become the scourge of small businesses and quickly, severely restrict budgets available for growth, marketing, the launch of new products and services. A quick and easy path to loss of market share and opportunity. Technical debt is also a source of ongoing and increasing revenue for the #GovCon community – for which small and mid-sized businesses should seriously focus their capability statements and value propositions.
Help with these types of challenges and opportunities is exactly a unique strength that the KME.digital team brings to the table, i.e. advising and consulting all our clients with respect to planning and spending on their own internal Information Technology, avoiding technical debt, or smartly marketing their capabilities to do so to other B2B or B2G customers.
Read “The Technical Debt Virus: Attacking an IT Contagion Across Federal, DoD, Army Data Center Ecosystems” – thought capital from the NTT DATA Federal Services, DoD & Intel Community.