Author: José Manuel Cano Muñiz (IMEF)
Date: June, 2025
Source: El Financiero
As businesses increasingly digitize, technology plays a pivotal role in delivering value. However, “technical debt” has emerged as a growing threat: it consists of the shortcuts and compromises made to achieve quick results in tech projects. Though tempting, failing to address these shortcuts can accumulate “interest” over time, potentially leading to technological paralysis or even system failures .
IMEF highlights that:
- Technical debt can account for up to 40% of IT balance sheets.
- It can add 10–20% extra costs to tech and innovation projects
Common causes include:
- Lack of awareness,
- Misalignment between IT and business goals,
- Commercial pressures,
- Poor requirement definition,
- Rigid or overly complex digital solutions,
- Misallocated resources
Business Impact:
Technical debt increases long-term maintenance and evolution costs, limits competitive agility, devalues tech assets, complicates integrations, and raises the risk of failures, security breaches, functionality gaps, and compliance issues.
Key Insight:
Technical debt isn’t inherently bad if managed properly. The critical point is to recognize, measure, and strategically reduce it—much like financial debt. Striving to eliminate it completely could stall projects or introduce other risks .
Best Practices for Management:
- Define what technical debt means for your organization and treat it as a business issue.
- Formalize governance: identify, quantify, prioritize, and allocate resources to manage it.
- Maintain a technology solvency ratio (assets vs. debt) greater than 1 .
Conclusion:
Technical debt is a necessary and manageable reality. Proper management frees up the full potential of digital transformation, reduces obsolescence risk, and ensures tech investments deliver maximum value .
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
1. What is technical debt?
Technical debt refers to the future cost incurred when software or technology systems are built quickly with compromises that will need to be corrected later.
2. Is technical debt always a bad thing?
No. Like financial debt, it can be useful in the short term to accelerate delivery. The key is to manage and repay it intentionally.
3. What are the main risks of not managing technical debt?
Unmanaged technical debt can lead to higher maintenance costs, increased risk of failures, delayed projects, reduced innovation capacity, and security vulnerabilities.
4. How can we measure technical debt?
There’s no universal metric, but organizations can assess it through code analysis, system audits, or by calculating the time and cost to refactor compromised components.
5. Who should be responsible for managing technical debt?
It’s a shared responsibility between IT leaders, business units, and finance teams. Managing it should be treated as a strategic business issue.
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