A blog by Martin Erasmuson
Edited and republished 27 March 2020
The information-bank-statement is in and it makes for grim reading. Our information-debt is significant, the interest payments are kicking-in and it’s starting to hurt. How did our organisations get into this pickle?
Like monetary-debt, information-debt is the liability deferred by impulsive, easy to implement solutions. Ad hoc, knee-jerk decisions made without considering the down-stream implications. Just like living off the credit card, eventually those chickens come home to roost.
Many organisations find they now have significant information-debt. Complex application, information and process architectures, typically on legacy software and hardware that evolved over time. This ‘debt’ can classified into three areas:
Physical costs including the overheads for maintaining/managing these legacy environments with the numbers of FTE staff or suppliers to maintain them, legacy servers and convoluted processes
Increased risk from ‘information accidents’ or applications running on unsupported software/hardware
Opportunity cost which is typically not considered AND bigger than you’d think, takes the form of the myriad of business opportunities available from agile, mobile architectures, or decisions that must be deferred as it takes so long to find and analyse the information or the information does not exist
There is a natural tension between expediency and thought-out decision making. In that sense information-debt is not necessarily bad. I’ve blogged before about adaptive-strategies and a ‘Good Enough is Perfect’ approach. On a personal level, I’ve used the company credit-card tactically for ease of accounting or smoothing out the cash-flow while waiting for invoices to be paid. So, debt is not bad per se. Sometimes a heuristic method is necessary and appropriate to make progress or get some momentum in the face of uncertainty (such as the March 2020 COVID19 pandemic!) while at the same acknowledging that a particular solution is not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect but is initially sufficient to move an initiative forward. Like using your credit card, it further requires us to acknowledge there is likely to be a ‘debt’ in the form of rework once the optimal solution is discovered.
The key point, if you are going to incur an information debt, make that decision consciously, up-front, with your eyes open, going into backlogs, budget, timelines and resourcing plans, rather than like a millennial on a road-trip with credit-card-lust.