Technical debt

Technical debt is the future cost created by choosing an expedient technical solution today. It shows up as slower change, higher run costs and higher risk. CIOs make it fundable by expressing it in business terms: time-to-change, outage exposure and cost to maintain.

Why it matters at a CIO Cafe table

Terms like Technical debt turn up at tables because the disagreement is usually about scope, not definition. Agreeing what the word means is the cheapest way to shorten a decision — which is why every table starts by framing the question in plain language.