Does your company have technical debt? How to identify it and how to start paying it off
Technical debt arises when a company grows, but its tools, processes or systems do not evolve at the same pace. It is the hidden cost of working with technology that no longer reflects the real operation, limiting efficiency, scalability and the ability to respond to the market.
How do you know if your company already has technical debt?
Technical debt isn't always obvious, but it creates daily friction that affects time, costs and decision-making. Identifying it early is key to preventing it from accumulating and ultimately stalling business growth.
Clear signs of technical debt
- Excessive reliance on Excel: manual processes that depend entirely on specific individuals.
- Unintegrated systems: duplicated, isolated or hard-to-trace information.
- Constant rework: operational errors and friction between different departments.
- Limited traceability: lack of visibility in operations, inventory or critical workflows.
- Obsolete tools: software that no longer scales or adapts to the current operation.
- Frequent failures: downtime, slowness or instability in key systems.
How to measure technical debt?
Technical debt can be evaluated by identifying processes that depend too much on manual labor, integrations that are pending or broken, recurring operational delays and a lack of unified information. The more information that is not centralized or available in real-time, the higher the accumulated debt.
How to start paying it off?
- Prioritize processes where friction generates costs, errors or delays.
- Modernize key systems and eliminate unnecessary redundancies.
- Automate repetitive or low-value tasks.
- Replace obsolete tools with scalable solutions.
- Integrate hardware, software and data into a unified ecosystem.
Paying off technical debt is not an expense: it is an investment that restores control, speed and efficiency. Modernizing your technological infrastructure liberates the operation, reduces costs and allows your company to move forward with greater clarity and stability.
