Is tech-debt stopping you from being customer centric?
Business transformation continues to be the way forward for any CIO charged with improving business outcomes. According to McKinsey, as much as 71% of the impact of business transformations depends on technology.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is a prime example of a solution which above all, champions your business’s ability to become truly customer centric as well as enabling genuine employee collaboration.
However, the excitement of investing in a technology that delivers a significantly better ROI than your old CRM must be tempered with the understanding that failing to resolve your existing technical debt will severely limit the anticipated business outcomes.
So, it often becomes a matter of first thing first. That is, getting rid of the old to welcome in the new – and have enough time, capacity and budget left over to deliver every possible gram of transformational value back to the business.
In McKinsey’s excellent 2023 article ‘Breaking technical debt’s vicious cycle to modernize your business, they aptly describe technical debt as the ‘silent killer of technology modernisation efforts’, typically accounting for about 40% of your IT balance sheet. And you can expect to pay another 10-20% to address tech debt on top of the costs of any modernisation project.
McKinsey further reports that of the CIOs they surveyed, 30% believe that over 20% of their technical budget earmarked for new products is diverted to resolving issues related to existing tech debt. And CIOs estimate that 20-40% of the value of their entire technology estate (pre-depreciation) is made up of tech debt.
So, what are the realities of your accrued debt, and how do they impact your business and its ability to realise its potential?
Tech-debt is a negative investment in every sense of the word. It consumes a huge amount of internal time and budget – and erodes your ability to compete. What’s often unappreciated by the rest of the executive team (who are keen to adopt smarter and more impactful bells-and-whistles solutions - like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement) is that accumulated technical debt inevitably becomes business debt and must be dealt with once and for all so you can move forward.
Only then, can your business take the necessary steps (or leaps) towards digital transformation and embrace all the benefits of being more customer centric and collaborative.
The good news though, is that when you chose a solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement – which is built on an evergreen low-code application platform that will support your entire business with a technology base for everything you need to grow (without racking up hours of development and support time) - you’ll never go back into that dark deep hole of accumulated debt.
You’re home, clear, and debt free.
