Public service: Overcoming the challenge of technical debt

Digital transformation of public services is an urgent priority. Not just so citizens can have seamless access to personalised support when and where they need it, but so agencies can empower their people with great user experiences, operate more efficiently and mitigate cyber risk.  

Pillars of any successful transformation? An integrated, multi-channel service delivery model. High-quality shared data to power decision-making. Effective change management to accelerate adoption of new digital capabilities. And an efficient, secure and sustainable technology infrastructure to underpin everything. 

A stubborn challenge that must be overcome 

Putting in place this final pillar is top of mind for the public sector. That’s because most government agencies are currently grappling with a common challenge – technical debt – that’s preventing them from keeping pace with technology change.  

Best defined as the consequence of age, complexity and unmanaged changes to an organisation’s IT landscape, it’s a stubborn issue – accreted through decades-old system evolution – that impedes digital enablement and stands in the way of transformed public service delivery.  

A common analogy used to understand technical debt is financial debt – taking out a loan with interest, for example. Typically, people take out loans for a specific purpose, with a clear repayment plan. But that’s seldom the case with technical debt, which usually gets accumulated on an ongoing basis without agencies realising it. The cost of fixing it increases all the time – to a point where it can become completely unmanageable. 

To put the scale of challenge in context, the UK’s Central Digital and Data Office recently identified more than 60 legacy systems across the country’s public sector that are at a critical level of risk. Meanwhile, in Canada, over 40% of the public sector struggles to combine next-gen tech with legacy systems and older technology systems. 

Agencies know they have to address this issue. As well as increasing their costs, technical debt reduces their flexibility and constrains progress to modernisation. Crucially too, by forcing government to implement short-term, tactical workarounds over carefully thought-out, well-tested solutions, it often results in lingering, long-term consequences that are extremely difficult to resolve. 

Understanding types of technical debt…and their impact 

Before tackling their technical debt, government agencies must understand where it’s most likely to be. This is critical to being able to classify the remediation approach that will be needed. We identify four main areas: 

• Application debt: Inflexible software that’s complex to modify, this results in a poor user experience, high maintenance costs and lack of visibility into applications across the organisation. 

• Architecture debt: Embedded in the design of the entire system, it’s produced by inflexible software platforms, flawed design, accumulated complexity and inadequate management processes. 

• Infrastructure debt: Residing in a system’s operating environments, this leads to security vulnerabilities, inability to scale, slow recovery times and costly maintenance. 

• Workforce debt: Created by an agency’s inability to keep pace with upskilling, inflexibility in existing processes, and over-concentrated knowledge of legacy applications and infrastructure. 

How to address technical debt 

Any transformation will impact how an organisation operates and the value it can deliver to consumers/citizens. By implementing interim fixes that inevitably become permanent and failing to update solutions that have become obsolete, some will result in accumulation of more technical debt. 

What’s needed is a structured process that can manage this in a strategic way. Focused on identification, isolation, control and reduction, this supports the realignment of an organisation towards efficient management of IT and associated services – both user- and citizen-facing.  

Identification involves collaboration with other parts of the organisation to isolate the technical debt. Proper identification supports better management of the impact of changes to the system on the wider environment. 

Control focuses on preventing sprawl and undocumented changes, managing any patches and changes through tightly controlled processes. This prevents build-up of further technical debt. Reduction is achieved by identifying the most relevant approach for the system moving forward, replacing outdated IT through dual-running, immediate replacement, gradual replacement and/or redundancy approaches. 

We used this approach to support a major insurance institution in New Zealand by reinventing service delivery through a large transformation programme. The scope included including replacing legacy applications with modern applications and technology and leveraging this new capability to transform processes, organisation and data. 

We worked with the institution to lead strategy on the programme, including designing, building and implementing the key capabilities needed to support transformation and defining a roadmap to replace ageing, complex and inflexible architecture with modern applications. With a new, collaboratively designed service delivery model, teams across the organisation are now equipped to deliver best-possible outcomes, while simultaneously reducing technology debt. 

Harnessing the benefits 

Tasked with transforming service delivery against tight budgets and constant cyber threat, agencies are focused on the technical debt challenge. By driving forward with a strategic programme to remediate the issue, they can expect to harness benefits in three key areas: 

• Lower costs: By preventing aged and inefficient processes from burdening their operations, agencies will remove the costs of maintaining them and be able to focus on implementing more efficient technology to keep up with the pace of change (eg cloud-based platforms). 

• Better-quality outcomes: Less technical debt allows for more efficient operations and processes that can take advantage of advanced tech without increasing the burden on agency staff and citizens. Over time, this supports delivery of better-quality services. 

• Increased flexibility: With a future-focused strategy to reduce technical debt (and fewer costs and resources tied to unchanged and aged processes), agencies will have more flexibility to transform in response to changes in the tech landscape and citizen expectations.  

 Thank you for taking the time to read this article! I would like to acknowledge PwC Canada , Archie Crichton-Stuart , and Cecil Smith for their collaboration and thinking around technical debt in the public sector.

To find out more about our proven approach for reducing technical debt in the public sector, please reach out to myself or Archie Crichton-Stuart .