2023, the year of tackling your technical debt ?

 

Now that the year has started, it's a new dive in the day to day business, running from one client to another, shifting between priorities and deadlines. And what strikes me this year, besides the energy crisis (and the IT CIO costs cut paired to scarce resources), inflation, climate crisis, the Ukrainian war, it's the motivation to change the current status. Let me explain.

Now that the majority of budgets has been granted, there is the recurrent pressure to 'do more, with less' (less people, less time to execute or to test, less money to get things done) and a need to address the legacy situation within IT departments. Tackling the legacy (being the old systems and solutions, already obsolete or nearly out of date) is not a walk in the park. You need to get an accurate inventory of what you have in prod (back office, front office solutions, hardware, storage, security solutions, development frameworks, security solutions, language used to code...or even your project management methodologies that can be unfit for purpose nowadays [think on the business need of agility, where pleading for waterfall and GANTT charts seems to be so old school for managing projects. But do not fall in the trap: each project methodology has pro's and con's], a clear understanding of your As is and what will be your To be, and a strategy (the master plan :) to get there.

And with all those challenges and goals to be achieved, we need to strive to reshuffle the priorities, mixing the IT strategies in new accomplishments and retire the oldest elements of the IT landscape. In other words, more work for IT pros and more complexity along the road. More with less, they said.