I ran across an article on the 7 types of tech debt that can cripple your business, which is a great title. It certainly is one that might scare a lot of CTOs/CIOs/tech management. I am sure that much of the IT management gets concerned on a regular basis with how quickly their staff can evolve their software to meet new business needs.
The first two items have to do with data, which is understandable. Data is the core of how many organizations operate and move forward, and if you don’t have the ability to easily work with data in a flexible way, you can struggle. Many of us technical people know this, but I find many non-data-professional staffers don’t get this and are often unwilling to work at improving the situation. They things to just be magically better without changing how they do their jobs.
Many of us data professionals know that data quality is crucial. Many others assume we have quality data. Both of us need to understand that some of our data is suspect, but most of us is pretty good. Don’t get drawn into a black/white argument that our data is amazing or horrible. No matter what we do, there will be errors, so account for that. At the same time, do some testing, some evaluation, and double-check yourself.
We also need to ensure some level of performance from our data stores (databases, data lakes, etc.). Too often we see queries start to slow down and blame the DBAs. We ask them for better performance without being willing to press on developers (or vendors) to improve the performance of their code. Don’t just expect to build bigger machines, make sure you train staff to write better queries and help DBAs learn how to better index systems. We’re a team, so let’s work as a team on our performance issues.
There are a few AI-related items and a couple of DevOps items as well. All tech debt is a problem; it just depends on how much you have as to how big a problem it is for your systems. However, the seventh item is cultural debt. AI is part of this, as staff can have job-threatening views of AI, but that’s really a lack of trust. Management has to build trust with staff and ensure they are cared for if management expects staff to be accountable for code. Workers have to drive themselves forward, as a part of the technology revolution is that change is a given. Don’t expect to do the same job you’ve done for years. Learn to use new tools and learn to use them effectively in your position.
At the same time, management has to value employees and be clear about what’s expected or workers. Be fair with employees and value their efforts. Working together is what will drive your organization forward.
Steve Jones
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Voice of the DBA 
Steve – From the artilce:
IT departments that lifted and shifted large databases to the cloud without optimizing the data architecture may have created a steep step up in database management debt to operationalize over time.
This is one I’ve personally been thru. We were forced to move our SQL Server DB to the vendors cloud setup and as sure as excessive taxes are due every year, performance dropped. I have been at my job for almost 20 years and I worked hard to get the DB performance optimized. There is one process that we run at the end of each month that is accounting data related that when I started would take around 2- 2.5 hours to execute. After I re-worked some of it and added some indexes I got it down to 30-45 minutes. Most of it was just replacing poorly written SQL with better code and Index maintenance. The first time we ran this process after moving to the vendors cloud it took 1.-1.5 hours. That’s not as bad as how long the process originally took but it was still frustrating b/c I knew it was taking 2x as long because the vendors IT people either don’t know what they should or didn’t care about optimal performance. We are what I call a captured client. When a company has invested a lot of money & time on a mission critical software application, the vendor of said application can get away with less then expected service b/c they know its very costly for a company to switch systems and so the vendor can get away with a lot before loosing a large client. I believe way too many “we have to move to the Cloud now!” actions have taken place. Cloud service providers did an incredible job of marketing the cloud to executives who often seemed to be more focused on saving a few dollars since the cloud is cheaper then on prem management of hardware/software, then considering the possible downsides like drops in performance. Eventually our performance improved but it took over a year and a lot of complaining from our end. On the upside we did hold out from moving to the cloud version of the application for as long as we could. I can only imagine how bad it probably was for other clients who were early adopters of this vendors cloud based software /services.
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So many people don’t want to rethink anything and just go to the cloud.
We are seeing a few of them coming back on premises now and likely more coming in the future.
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“We are seeing a few of them coming back on premises now and likely more coming in the future.”
Now that is very interesting. I had not heard of anyone doing that but it’s good to hear. The cloud is a tool and it’s not a do-it-all tool. There are some scenarios where it’s the ideal solution and there are some where it’s not. Its good to hear that some are coming back on-prem.
Are you able to provide any examples, names of companies doing that?
Thanks
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I love your last paragraph; it rings very true. Too often employers don’t seem to view the employer/employee relationship as one of an even exchange of employee time and work for employer pay but instead view the employees as ones who should be thankful they have a job. I view this as a downside of an excess of labor in the job market. Shortly after covid when business were having trouble finding employees, a friend of mine who worked at an international fast food service chain told me it was the best time to work there because managements attitude towards staff changed drastically. It’s not that they were treated unfairly or poorly before but as soon as employers experienced labor shortages the existing employees saw greatly improved responses from management. In my 35 years of working this lack of respect for employees by employers is something I’ve seen mostly at larger companies. Small to mid-size businesses in my opinion, treat employees better; more fairly and respectfully. I worked for a small business of less than a dozen employees and it was the best job/employer I’ve ever had. This man respected his people and treated us more than fair. When he sold the business which was kind of like a franchise, back to the corporation which was buying back all franchise operations it had setup, he gave every employee a share of the money he got and the amount you got was based on years of service. The way he viewed it was that even though it was his business, we all helped him build it. I respect that man more than any employer I have ever worked for and I’ve had some great employers as well as not so great.
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I agree, but the same things swings both ways. During boom times when employees need people and there aren’t any, I see plenty of employees with no loyalty, pressing for raises or more salary, etc.
I find far too few Americans willing to treat random others fairly in the employee relationship and instead taking advantage of others.
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You’re always going to have bad actors on both sides but in general I believe more than less are doing the job. All one can do is the right thing w/o expectations of anything more then being treated the same as you treat others.
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