Network Infrastructure

How to Stop Technical Debt from Eating Your IT Budget

NextGov: As senior agency leaders and government chief information officers take on IT modernization with gusto, they quickly discover decades of unaccounted for technical debt to be addressed. In its simplest definition, technical debt represents the investment needed to update legacy systems to fully address current requirements. Bigger picture, this equation must include upgrade costs to modernize systems, current workaround costs like manual processing, incurred risks and lost opportunities to improve performance or innovate.

What soon becomes apparent is that federal agencies need more systematic approaches for managing, measuring and remediating this debt. While implementing these more rigorous practices can be challenging, they also provide the foundation for a more continuous modernization strategy or sustainable digital decoupling.

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