How to Manage Data Debt for Accelerated Digital Transformation

Here defined data debt and how to manage it when preparing for digital transformation

Data debt is a term based on the concept of technical debt. Also called technical debt, a word that comes from the Agile software development world. Technology debt refers to the cost of deferring a software feature or choosing an easy and quick solution instead of a more thoughtful one that would take longer to achieve. Data Governance and DataOps disciplines will serve as instruments of paying off data debt and hence reducing it to a great extent.

The data debt concept can be used as a strong argument in discussions with key stakeholders for driving the company's new data-related processes and policies. Data debt should be considered as part of a transformation journey to realize benefits. Digital transformation is a necessary step for companies wanting to build capability and differentiate themselves from the competition. Digital transformation shouldn't be locked in without considering a different kind of asset of data.

Data debt and digital transformation:

Digitizing a business can be a complex process. Digital transformation goal is to be more agile, flexible, customer-centric, or automated. Data debt doesn't lead to outcomes or enable some of the most useful options such as digital twins or artificial intelligence to work.

Technical debt is complicated. Incomplete data only results in making decisions with an incomplete picture of organization's position, not getting the expected results, or worse, developing strategies that lead to losses. This is data debt. It can occur when companies take shortcuts or create workarounds to deal with bad data.

All these issues lead to a data ecosystem that is unhealthy. This causes data debt. It wastes time, costs money, undermines decisions, causes platform stability issues or outages, and can render cutting-edge technology moot.

Hindering to digital transformation:

Any digital transformation strategy must consider technical debt. Technical debt is the price a company pays for short-term technological fixes. It hinders their ability to innovate and adapt in the digital age. It can greatly hinder the pace of an organization's innovation.

Technical debt grows and puts additional fixed operating costs on the company, diverting precious investment in innovation and new capabilities. Technical debt is common for products, especially during a digital transformation. And it is important to make sure it's kept under control. Otherwise, it becomes too difficult to rectify, like a snowball rolling downhill, constantly growing and collecting sticks and rocks along the way.

Technical/ Data Debt Problems:

Technical debt can cause different problems because the complexity in code has led to new defects in the product. Code can also be very hard to understand and the process of adding new features is often time-consuming, adding to the challenge.

Some organizations have several legacy products to upgrade or one big product that should be broken up into multiple microservices. Other times, duplicate code needs to be updated or changed in multiple places to fix the problem. Companies struggle to remove obsolete libraries with security or have performance issues due to the high impact of the change. To avoid these extreme consequences, they need to take full control of technical debt.

Bypass the technical debt problems:

• Align along IT and business strategy to clarify the overall business strategy and define the capabilities needed at an enterprise level.
• By prioritizing automation and elevating human innovation, time and resources can be freed up so that organizations can focus on creating a culture of innovation and enable long-term thinking to drive revenue growth.
• By choosing flexible consumption models whereby they can pay only to what is used, and safeguard budgets when workloads are bound to fluctuate.
• Organizations focused on the delivery of short-term projects won't be able to reduce the mounting technical debt.

Conclusion: Data is crucial to digital transformation. Ignoring data debt will not only affect day-to-day operations but also will grow as your data volume does. If data debt is reduced, advanced technology will open up, attracting good staff, happy customers, competitors receding in the distance, and, consequently, having a healthy bottom line.