Digital Workplaces are Central to a Sustainable Enterprise — Exploring Possibilities for Technical Debt Reduction (Part IV)
In this ongoing series of blogs, we have been looking at the many facets of technical debt incurred by an enterprise as it tries to speed up technology change.
Part I looked at the impacts of technical debt on enterprise employees. Part II decoded the different drivers behind debt accumulation, and how enterprises can approach debt analysis. In Part III, we explored the different solution models commonly adopted for debt resolution, with four product recommendations.
Given that debt continues to be a pervasive yet often ignored challenge, it is vital for enterprises to find new ways to modernize that are sustainable and debt-lite. According to a 2019 research, 42% of executives, developers, and project managers aren’t even aware of their debt status — and only 10% are actively managing debt even as we speak.
There are several ways enterprises can get on the right side of the debt conundrum, either taking incremental steps or adopting a holistic resolution roadmap.
As I mentioned in the last blog, a holistic model is ideal given the fragmented nature of the debt, multiple enterprise verticals and silos, and the rapid pace of transformation we are witnessing today. By choosing an incremental approach, enterprises risk adding further debt to an already growing pile.
In fact, an average developer in a typical enterprise spends 3.8 hours every week on resolving bad code, taking away from productivity.
The Holistic Model of Debt Mitigation — 4 Key Prongs
To begin with, a debt-ridden enterprise must take stock of the current IT infrastructure, highlighting the most crippling problem areas as well as better-performing parts. This includes a thorough assessment of the age, maturity, and design of your IT estate.
Next, this should be followed up by a push towards modernized and future-ready infrastructure components. The objective of technical remediation should also include improving productivity and eliminating wasteful activities. The four prongs of undergoing a holistic shift towards a low-debt enterprise environment are:
- Embracing cognitive technology
As discussed in Part II, cognitive has a role to play in both incremental and holistic debt resolution models. If you are choosing incremental, cognitive can help identify specific use cases, gaps in UX, and unalignment with the desired business functionality. More importantly, cognitive is the bedrock of any holistic transformation, intelligently assessing application priority and usage frequency. These applications are prime candidates for modernization.
2. Migrating to the cloud
The public cloud eliminates the need to manage historical infrastructure, reducing both fiscal and code overheads. Enterprises can also increase the efficiency and velocity of transformation, without compromising on security requirements. Traditional manual tasks can be replaced via cloud-based automation, freeing up technical resources for genuine productivity.
3. Deploying digital workplace solutions
Interestingly, the impact of technical debt extends far beyond technology. It slows down enterprise transformation, making employees less engaged and leading to lost opportunities for the business. “Technology laggard” organizations face a 6x higher attrition risk due to outdated technology when compared to digital-first enterprises.
Therefore, it is so important to replace aging on-premise workplace tools with virtual, SaaS-based solutions. A digital workplace solution addresses multiple aspects of debt:
● It reduces capital expenditure by replacing expensive and fragmented software with a flexible, cloud-based and integration-ready system.
● Operational costs also shrink as new processes are easy to incorporate and employees can be quickly trained for new tasks.
● Productivity rises, benefiting the business bottom line — in a world where workplace IT issues creates a £4 billion productivity “black hole” in the UK alone, digital workplace solutions are a definite imperative.
● With rising employee engagement, productivity also improves, diverting manual tasks like bad code resolution to automated systems instead.
4. Developing an effective search strategy
Another way to improve productivity is by optimizing and reducing technical debt in search & curation times of knowledge items. Employees are spending a disproportionate amount of time on search engines to confirm views, analyze competitors, and find missing information. Smarter enterprise search can help to quickly identify key pieces of data, making better decisions and enhancing overall enterprise capability.
Microsoft Search and Omnity are among the top enterprise tools which can boost productivity and save time. Launched in 2016, Omnity is a research and semantic mapping search engine that helps to find related documents. You can discover how different knowledge items are interconnected, specifically in the fields of science, medicine, engineering, law, and finance.
Enterprise search can also help marketers and knowledge workers to create unique content or identify innovative ideas.
Importantly, Omnity comes in an enterprise version and as well an open/free option. Companies can integrate the tool with existing content management systems (CMS) and other repositories to create an enterprise-wide associative semantic search mechanism, essential creating an interconnected map between knowledge that is dispersed across documents.
Migrating to Next-Gen Platforms is the Need of the Hour
Technology giants across the world, recommend immediate workplace modernization as a key component of enterprise debt resolution strategies. For example, Intel applies Gartner’s TIME model for debt reduction where M or (or Migrate) refers to the indirect reduction of technical debt by consolidating to fewer platforms.
The goal is simple: Identify frequently accessed apps and mission-critical workflows. Align these to a SaaS-based, 360-degree digital workplace counterpart. Migrate processes and eliminate end-of-life apps/systems to cut your losses.
All enterprises need to do, therefore, is push back and take an objective look at their IT estate before taking the leap.
