How Enterprises Can Avoid Tech Debt While Pioneering Progress

By Dinesh Varadharajan, Chief Product Officer (CPO) at Kissflow

In recent decades, the GCC has emerged as a trailblazer. Far from being content with just following the trend, countries in the region have aspired to set it – whether that be the UAE in being the first country in the world to appoint a Minister for Artificial Intelligence, or Saudi Arabia’s US$40billion push to lead the ongoing AI revolution. Private enterprises throughout the region also move rapidly to mitigate risks or take advantage of opportunities.

Speed is everything, so many pioneering projects inevitably involve technology. And when an organisation gathers its stakeholders to discuss digital transformation, the roadmap becomes littered with deadlines. This is understandable. No business wants to be stuck in due diligence while its competitors are onboarding new customers. Nonetheless, quick fixes and fast-spun code can lead to a cycle of heavy maintenance burdens and spiralling costs – or as it has come to be known, technical debt.  

This debt is inevitable when replacement of legacy systems becomes an urgent priority. For example, pre-2023, a GCC business may have been exploring AI use cases with a view to digitalising a core workflow. Then, when ChatGPT started grabbing everyone’s imagination, the business’s technical and business leaders may have felt a greater sense of urgency about adopting AI. They may have had concerns about more agile players entering their industry or an existing competitor, powered by generative AI, bringing new offerings to the marketplace.

Complex interdependencies

But in moving away from legacy systems and processes, it is critical that project leaders pay due attention to their complex interdependencies with other assets. If an organisation puts speed before quality, its short-term approach may lead to suboptimal coding decisions that dampen the effectiveness of the overall solution and call for ongoing fixes that accrue as technical debt. Such debt can become an obstacle to the very transformation that was originally envisaged.

Technical debt is easier to prevent than to eliminate. Technical leaders that have been primed to avoid it will be wary of practices such as taking shortcuts during software development. They can inform line-of-business executives of the future inefficiencies that are risked by prioritising short-term results in the present. If the DevOps team spends increasingly more time reworking code, that leaves less time to develop new digital experiences. Decision makers will be trapped by the choice of leaving suboptimal code in place, delaying new projects, or recruiting new developers. Every one of these options carries a significant cost.

Shortcut today, slowdown tomorrow

The lessons of technical debt are clear. If we take a shortcut today, we may face a slowdown or a standstill later in our digitalization journey. When DevOps leaders make the case for more careful development cycles, however, they must be able to frame the problem in a way that will resonate with non-technical executives. Tech-team leaders can point out that technical debt leads to less innovation, which inevitably impacts customer engagement. Developers that are fixing issues related to past shortcuts are not building new solutions. If a market opportunity arises and the development team is distracted or unavailable, then that opportunity will likely be missed. This also applies to the ability to react to external crises.

Some non-technical stakeholders may be interested in the escalating financial costs of maintaining and updating applications amid technical debt. They may also be alarmed to learn that the longer the debt goes unaddressed, the more expensive it will be to fix. Stakeholders of a financial mindset will likewise see a business risk in technical debt if they are told that it slows or prevents growth. This is also an easy case to make. Put simply, if the enterprise cannot bring new offerings to customers quickly enough, then a competitor captures that opportunity for growth.

Potentially the most damaging of all is the impact tech debt can have on cybersecurity. In the GCC’s highly regulated markets, private companies must master the vulnerabilities in their core business systems. On top of the risks posed by original shortcuts, each workaround, patch, and upgrade is a chance to introduce another vulnerability that threat actors can exploit. Most modern business leaders need no more information than that to recognize the severe risks involved.

Low-code to the rescue

When under pressure from development backlogs and tight deadlines, moving fast may be an unfortunate necessity. But thanks to Low-code and no-code (LCNC) app development platforms, teams can now accelerate development without accumulating technical debt. LCNC platforms allow non-technical users to become citizen developers, alleviating the labour burden on IT and enabling solutions to go live much more quickly.

Agile, iterative development is crucial to competitiveness in a region where markets change rapidly. Low-code/no-code app development allows businesses to maintain quality, security, and efficiency while meeting the demand for new experiences. Technical debt becomes a thing of the past if DevOps teams carefully manage delivery expectations. Low-code/no-code platforms allow tighter deadlines to be more realistic because best-practice code has already been written and passed quality checks. With IT and non-IT leaders working together, LCNC adoption becomes the first step in eliminating technical debt and making sure it no longer stands in the way of progress.