The business decision to transform technology should not come from an IT department but from the company itself. Bold choices don’t come from the people who have to run the entire show and who will be held accountable if a project goes off track or becomes more difficult than originally planned.
The job of an IT department is to get things done, keep tasks on track, and implement the new technologies that departments need. In a sense, it’s not natural for an IT department to ‘make their boat’ by deploying new technologies and advanced tools.
However, change is inevitable. Gartner predicts that spending on technology services and products in Australia will grow by A$109 billion in 2022, an increase of 6.5 percent from 2021. It has accelerated in the past two years as pandemic business conditions set many organizations’ digitization plans in motion.
In addition to this accelerated change, no company in Australia should exist without a backlog of updates, upgrades, and general technological advancements – on top of uber’s plans for transformation.
Any organization that sits back and enjoys a highly functional and efficient enterprise technology stack isn’t planning or trying hard enough. Industry, markets, and consumer demands have dynamic benchmarks.
Add technical debt to that, and the situation becomes even more complex. A recent OutSystems survey found that 69 percent of IT leaders worldwide view technical debt as a major threat to their company’s ability to innovate.
Old code combined with new applications and SaaS sprawl places a serious roadblock between the enterprise and competing corporate structures. To face the threat of technical debt, finding new ways to get around this problem is imperative.
Combine these factors, and it becomes clear that a company must constantly look inward to drive change to overcome technical debt and stay ahead of the competition.
Big, bold technology and ideas don’t always last; the barrier is often the amount of time and resources it takes to make things happen. Add to that that your average IT department is generally overworked and often on a tight budget, and it gets tough. Business leaders and IT teams must find common ground in the coalition.
Ask people what they want and hope to achieve with applications and development. Nine times out of ten, they will admit that their ideas are limited by what they want to do rather than what they know is feasible. Ask people what they wish to do when developing applications, and they will generally ask for a faster horse while NEEDING a better carriage.
These factors suggest a gap between expectations and outcomes,mes and the development speed is the mitigating factor.
Instead of a series of plans that try to bypass technical debt and create slow technological change, finding tools to make complex tasks faster and more efficient will save time, effort, and capital.
High-performance low-code development platforms are fast – much faster than writing native code. They enable a company to create what they need in about a quarter of the time it takes to develop proprietary code.
An Australian organization recently came under the spotlight when it was revealed that their mobile platform took 24 months to develop and publish – and that the result did not perform well despite the very long lead time. In addition, a separate iteration was developed for Android – at more time and cost.
A low-code platform would have enabled this build in a fraction of the time. In addition, a greatly increased development speed would have allowed for testing and consumer feedback during application development, reducing errors and ensuring that the final product was more in tune with consumer demand.
This lack of speed and agility is often countered by acquiring a smaller company that brings the right components to the organization. We see it repeatedly in Australia, where a larger organization with a pool of traditional desktop developers is taking over a smaller company because they don’t have the right people to help them go mobile.
Again, a low-code development platform can counteract the need to spend a lot of capital by buying out the competitors to get what the company needs. If a platform can help quickly build out a company’s pipeline projects and reduce technical debt, it doesn’t have to buy what it can’t develop in-house.
An organization should take the time to explore whether new ways will work better than their existing development setup. They should make an effort to evaluate different platforms and more recent technologies and determine if a new software platform might replace several older ones, reducing technical debt. Ultimately, an organization needs to set aside time to look at the things that will save time in the long run.
