Full article originally published by Healthcare IT Today on November 19, 2024.

With enterprise technology evolving more rapidly than ever before, and the advent of AI and other new tools, it has been a struggle for organizations to keep up. This lag is also known as “technical debt”—the idea that IT systems fall behind the latest and greatest technologies because teams opted to “borrow” against long-term quality in service of short-term workability. A recent report from Forrester found that nearly four in five IT decision leaders in the U.S. face at least moderate levels of technical debt.

For those IT leaders and others in their situation, it’s especially crucial that technical debt is addressed promptly since it compounds at a very high interest rate. Organizations anxious to apply quick fixes to deep-rooted problems might see short-term benefits and avoid large-scale disruption for a while but eventually, too many of these band-aid solutions will slow innovation to a crawl. It’s nearly impossible to improve or change a module when it’s unclear what the follow-on effects will be. When a new tool is added on as a patchwork fix for one problem, it results in additional technical debt in another area, and the cycle continues.

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