Technical Debt & The Small to Mid-Sized Business

The IT needs of today’s small to mid-sized businesses are far different than they were just a few years ago. IT today is expected to be a serious participant in a company’s drive to find new business opportunities as well as speed up time-to-market when developing and launching new products or services. Whether they are aware of it or not, companies whose IT systems are not up to date will likely be stymied in their efforts and actually suffer from rising costs with no attendant benefits.

Business owners and executives who deal with property ownership, whether these properties be rental units, restaurants, office facilities, or others, are familiar with the term “deferred maintenance.” It is the accumulated and ever-growing cost that will at some time in the future ultimately have to be paid to bring these buildings up to speed after ownership has been neglecting them over time. In technology, a new term has arisen to define the same scenario: “Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt) is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.” Wikipedia. Although this term was originally coined by a software developer, today this term is also applied to IT hardware.