Aware of what tech debt costs them, CIOs still can’t make it an IT priority

“You don’t just say, ‘We’ve got an old ERP system that is out of vendor support,’ because they’ll argue, ‘It still works; it’s worked fine for years,’” he says. “Instead, you have to say, ‘We need a new ERP system because you have this new customer intimacy program, and we’ll either have to spend millions of dollars doing weird integrations between multiple databases, or we could upgrade the ERP.’”

Tie tech debt to other projects

An IT modernization and digital transformation angle for replacing old software and hardware can be a compelling argument, says Tim Beerman, CTO at IT services firm Ensono. Tackling tech debt on its own may not win CIOs a lot of supporters from higher-level management.

“A lot of it gets into even modernization as you’re building new applications and new software,” he says. “Oftentimes, if you’re interfacing with older platforms that have sources of data that aren’t modernized, it can make those projects delayed or more complicated.”