Navigating Technical Debt – Chris Pickard, CAI

This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Chris Picard, who is an executive vice president for c a i, working in the commercial side of the business, and we're gonna be talking about technical debt.

You know, it's that thing nobody else wants to really talk about, but it never goes away. Hey Chris, welcome to the show. Hi.

Thanks Mike. Appreciate it. Glad to be here.

We have been struggling with technical debt for as long as I can remember, but we don't seem to have a plan to deal with it. We just kinda let it pile up and pile up and maybe we don't go in and fix things as aggressively as we should, or maybe we just get enamored of that shiny new thing and we forget about it all. But is all this stuff coming back to bite us?

Yeah, I think it is at, at some point, right? It's to your point, we've been dealing with it for decades. It's, uh, I like to use the analogy of c i o once told me it's a lot like painting the Golden Gate bridge, right?

As soon as you get done, you gotta go back and start all over again. And we've seen that with technical debt over the decades, whether it was back in the last recession where everybody was trying to scramble to get things to market. You had the same thing happened with Covid and now with the pace of change, the rate at which that technical debt is piling up is increasing a lot faster than what it was, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ago, right?

Because that rapid change, we just are trying to get stuff to market so that technical debt is just piling up and piling up. And I, I think as stuff continues to advance, if we don't get better out in front of it, we're gonna have more challenges down the road. Um, especially when you look at cyber threats and things like that.

It's just, it continues to drive the exposure for us. Well, that's the interesting question is it all the cyber attacks that we're now dealing with seem to be exposing all these vulnerabilities that exist in that technical debt. So is that's where the pressure's coming from?

Is that what's really shining a light on this issue? I think that, and I also think the pace of change as it's continued to pick up the technical debt that we've accumulated is starting to impact that, right? So as developers are having to spend more time addressing some of that technical debt, not only are they not as productive, but we're not able to get stuff as market to market as fast, right?

So part of that challenge is the cyber threat is still out there and that drives behavior, but then also wanting to continue to drive that speed to market, that technical debt really prevents those. And, and you end up with spending 50, 60, 70% of your time trying to address the technical debt just to get the next product out. Um, is one of the challenges I think, think we're seeing today Is that also coming home, the roost with all these digital business transformation initiatives.

I think a business executive shows up and they see something cool where, you know, Google threw maybe a several hundred engineers at it and they're like, well, why can't we do something like that? But then it turns out that we have all these arcane SS a p, our APIs that we're trying to integrate to move forward with a system of record. So do you think the business side really understands what's at the root of this technical debt issue?

No, I, I don't think they do because they're looking at what's the user experience, what are they getting, how are they getting the product to market? How are they driving the, the digital customer experience? They only see the outcome on the business process.

They may not make that connection back all the way through that decisions that were made, let's say during covid to get something out faster, have generated that technical debt that now the next thing that they want to do, they can't because they've accumulated this technical debt that we're decisions made to say, let's get out there faster now because we're gonna miss out because everybody's doing remote or it's all e-commerce or pick your, your storyline by vertical now that's affecting the ability for the next generation of what they need to do. And they're not making that connection. 'cause they only see it on the business process side.

And, and I think that drives challenges for our IT executives. And we see this all the time when we're working with clients. CIOs are struggling to get the budgets to do the things that they need to do to address the technical debt because it doesn't add value or it doesn't generate sales or it doesn't help really move the business forward.

It's addressing all that stuff that's accumulated. And I think CIOs really struggle to get that, that budget to address that because budgets are tight right now, right? And that's, that's one of the challenges everyone's facing.

What is the quickest path to addressing this? Some folks would say, I should just replace applications, other folks wanna rewrite them and turn them into modern microservices. But it seems to me there are trade-offs along the way to be made.

So how do I figure all this out? Yeah, I, I think there's not, you know, like any typical IT answer, right? It depends.

There's no one solid answer. It all depends on what's the legacy that you've kind of sitting on top of, right? Are you already in that micro architecture strategy?

Have you already moved to a cloud first and you've got an easier path to address that technical debt? Or have you made decisions that say, I'm gonna leave my legacy application because I'm gonna get this new cloud first enabled application out there that doesn't need the legacy app anymore and I'm gonna retire that, but that retirement never comes and you're still dependent on it. So I think depending on the strategy, either you've gotta have that, that app rationalization plan that says these apps are going away and we're gonna shut 'em down and this is the date and it's gonna happen.

Or you have to have dedicated portions of your team either through your partner or through your internal IT staff that says, all this team focuses on is technical debt and they're just part of the IT budget. You don't call it out separately as as the team addressing technical debt, but it's part of your run operations and you've gotta set that money in in that budget aside and that capacity so that you're constantly addressing it because to your point, it's just gonna keep coming, right? The next project, the next thing, it's always gonna be out there.

And so you've almost gotta get to the point now where at the pace of change, you've got a dedicated team that's really focused on driving out that technical debt. This starts to sound like a session in congress, but nobody wants to assume responsibility for the technical debt. A lot of times I'll listen to business executives who are like, no, I don't want you to turn off that app and it's a centralized service and I'm just consuming it and I don't know how much it costs, but I'm running a process on it so it's not clear to me the IT folks and the CIOs have the political authority to turn things off.

So how do you have this conversation? How do you navigate it? Yeah, I think like anything, right?

You have to be able to put the value that's being delivered and the cost of that back to your business partners, right? And if you can't articulate that the spend that they're ultimately funding, right, through different initiatives is consuming the budget or the cycles without the value to get to the next projects, then you can start to drive that conversation with your business partners. Ultimately they're a partner, right?

You have to make sure they understand that value. They have to understand the cost of business, they have to understand what the trade-offs are. And if you're not able to make those connections, I, I agree with you a hundred percent, Mike, great.

The business is never gonna wanna spend that money on addressing the technical debt because they're like, it's in the back room, it's working, don't bother me. But they don't understand what that real cost is and what the value that they're not getting as a result because they're just focused on the next thing. So I think it's all about value generation, it's all about tying it back to the outcomes and it's about tying it back to that overall dollar value that that's getting spent on it, whether it's a black box or not, it's still dollars to the business.

And as executives in the organization, we all have to be worried about that. Does this not lead to some aberrant behavior? Because if I look at the IT budget, I could probably assume that 95% of it is spoken for every year just keeping the existing stuff running and I only have a handful of dollars for innovation.

So then when something innovative comes up, I go back to the business unit and I say basically you pay for it. And then the business unit winds up allocating dollars from their budget to go pay for the innovative thing, when in reality we're just kind of moving dollars around from one cost center to another. And the C F O probably looks at all of this and says, how come you guys are crazy?

Yeah. And, and I guess the, the question becomes is if you've, if you've understood the plan and you say, this is what we're gonna do to address the technical debt, this should ultimately reduce the operating costs so that you can put money back towards the innovation. If you're not building out and, and reducing that technical debt, you're a hundred percent right.

The operating cost is gonna be 80, 90, you know, 95% of the budget and only 5% for innovation. That means you haven't addressed the technical debt. You, you need to constantly drive that down every year and every year as you're addressing the technical debt that should be lowering the operating cost so that you can drive the innovation and can get to the next product.

Because that's the trade off, right? If you're not doing it, then you're right, the innovation budget is gonna continue to shrink. 'cause everybody, your, your budget is gonna be spent on just trying to keep the lights on, which honestly people get tired of, right?

They don't see the change, they don't see the value that they need and, and we really gotta make that assumption and that drive. So it's really constantly pushing that down. If you're not reducing your operating expense every year, then you're not appropriately addressing your technical debt and you're not having that money for innovation like you should have.

So what do I need to do? Do I need to go find Dr. Phil and put everybody in a room and have a little group therapy session?

Or is there some sort of more, uh, practical set of things I can do to get everybody headed in the right direction? Yeah, I, I think it's, to me it's always been about visibility. Um, you, you gotta, you gotta paint the picture, right?

You gotta put the red up on the wall, say, this is where it's broken. These are the problems that we have, this is the impact that it's having. And you've really gotta celebrate that red to make sure people understand this is where we have to focus, this is where we have to make the changes.

This is where the impact to the business is and how that continues to trend, right? It's if people just see it as the C I O or your chief digital officer saying, Hey, we need to fix this, but they don't see that that's growing and compounding every month, every quarter, every year with each new release, then they don't understand the impact, right? It just becomes, yeah, it's that thing that our IT company keeps telling us we need to fix and we need to deal with, but we got all this other stuff we need to spend money on.

I really believe you, you put it up there, you put it on the screen, you show the trend, you show how it's increasing, and you show the impact on the business value that you're not getting as a result of that. So that you change the mindset of people saying, yeah, we, we gotta do this, we gotta go invest in this. It's where we have to do, spend the money, or we're not gonna be where we need to be two years, three years, five years from now.

We Hear a lot about all things ai, so I can't help, but I guess I have to ask the question, but can AI someday save us from our technical debt? I think AI will help us. I think that especially when it comes to code generation and things like that, it'll help us make the decision to address the gaps in code that we definitely, that we're making the decision now of we don't wanna spend the time on because we're making those sacrifices.

So if we can reduce the amount of time that we're having to write code by using things like ai, then the amount of technical debt we pile up in theory should be less, right? Because it's really what we're making decisions on. It's time trade off on how we get things to market.

And if we're automating that code generation and then further automation that's already there with testing and things like that, then those trade-offs that we've made to accumulate technical debt should go down. We're still early on that, right? I think everybody's still trying to figure out where AI goes, but I think the promise is there.

The hope is there that using that, you know, things for code generation, things like that from an AI perspective, ultimately should help make those decisions easier on the trade-offs that we make and reduce that technical debt over time. The converse of that is that it's quite feasible. We're gonna live in a world where we just create more technical debt faster because we have tools to create applications faster, but no one's addressing the vulnerabilities.

'cause you know, the assumption is that the AI tool will fix that in the next upgrade cycle and we're not gonna get there either. So, um, will things get better or might they get worse before they get better? I, you know, I, I'm really not sure on that one.

It's, it's an interesting theory. I think it all depends on how are we governing ai, what are we allowing it to do? What's the learnings that it has, right?

It's if we, from a natural learning perspective, right? If we put our bias in there to accumulate technical debt, AI is naturally gonna continue to accumulate technical debt. But if we've moved that bias out, then it should help us remove that technical debt.

So it really depends on how AI evolves, it depends on the biases that have been put into it from a programming perspective. Could go either way. Really hard to say.

All right, folks, you heard it here. We have come to a work road. There are two roads to go down.

We think about this and we're smart. One may lead to all kinds of interesting, exciting innovations, and the other one may just take us right off the cliff. Hey Chris, thanks for being on the show.

Appreciate it. Thanks Mike. All right.

And back to you guys in the studio.