CIO Journal
- What’s the best way to get out of debt in the shortest amount of time?
Here are some popular ideas:
Focus on your interest payments. List your debts from highest interest rate to lowest, pay the highest off first, and then repeat the process until you’re debt-free.
- Try the snowball method. The idea is to build momentum by reducing the overall number of debts. Start with your smallest balance first, pay that debt off, then roll that same payment toward the next-smallest balance as you work your way up to the largest balance.
- One influencer offers more straightforward advice: find more ways to make money. Another suggests you use your first spare $10 to start investing in real estate.
A friend told me recently that he was so buried in credit cards, loans, and his mortgage, he felt he’d never get out from under it all. I suggested he could escape within ten years if he just stopped adding to his debt right now. I’ve said the same thing to CIOs facing a mountain of technical debt.
Getting out from under technical debt starts with a mindset change: you train yourself to enjoy getting rid of old stuff. It takes practice.
Technical debt
The term “technical debt” refers to the hard costs of taking shortcuts in IT solutions, like adding logic to recategorize data rather than fixing the data-entry process. That’s the traditional definition of the problem; it places blame on the technical teams. In reality, they usually take shortcuts only under pressure from executives. If you’re a CIO, you might not even realize you’re mortgaging your company’s future.
Let’s take a tried-and-true approach, like cutting up your credit cards. You can break three habits right now:
Stop incentivizing shortcuts.
Here’s a secret every data worker knows: getting rid of old stuff doesn’t earn technical people much recognition. Nobody other than you cares about your technical debt; leaders just want you to help them with whatever urgent solutions they want right now.
This cycle won’t change without an intervention.
I once put a trash can outside my office with a label on it for old applications and code. We celebrated people for filling it up.
You can also keep an eye on the volume of junk by continuously measuring the number of applications, reports, and integrations your team supports. Find ways like this to reward the determination, creativity, and relational skills required to turn off, decommission, and inactivate a system. People in your organization who do the work will appreciate clear messages like these.
Stop pigeonholing employees.
Who would want to work in an IT team where you know your job is unbreakably linked to a particular set of code? I know a guy who spent his entire career maintaining custom purchasing software code for a national retailer. When he decided to retire, the company kept him on payroll for a few more years just to ensure he’d transfer his knowledge to someone else.
CIOs call a situation like this a “single point of failure,” but that still sounds like shifting blame to the technical people. Pigeonholing an employee like this helps an executive get projects done sooner, but every code change puts both the company and the employee at risk.
Try making cross-training a core value in your team. Reorganize the work so that many team members share responsibility for supporting IT systems. Understanding the relationship between systems requires cross-functional experience, so be intentional about it.
Stop ignoring business process gaps.
Data teams create more technical debt than most other IT teams; it’s easier for them to move data than move people to adopt a new system. They create reports that combine data from the old system with data from the new system meant to replace it.
To counteract this tendency, I refused to grant people access to a new system until they agreed to let me revoke their access to the old system. That guaranteed the new system would meet all their requirements without writing reports.
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Getting out of technical debt won’t happen overnight, but just like my friend who was drowning in credit card debt, you can change your spending habits right now.
To remind you of this week’s data concept, enjoy Everything Counts by Depeche Mode, from the Frictionless Data Spotify playlist.
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