The growing risk and cost of accruing technical debt for Salesforce customers and other SaaS enterprise apps
This is the first blog article installment in a mini-series of five causes on the topic of Salesforce governance, digital operating model design and operation. Please do chime in with your perspective, learnings and recommendations..
Overview:
Conversations with other IT leaders in the enterprise and Salesforce space inform me about the increasing occurrences and growing costs of technical debt. This problem is particularly prevalent for long-time Salesforce customers (and newer customers who still need a governance practice and a digital operating model). Years of limited governance lead to increased risk and cost, which commonly manifests in system downtime, sluggish system performance, poor user adoption, degraded data quality and user confidence, slower time to deliver new functions and enhancements, and disconnects between business and IT.
sidebar: "Organizations are spending an average of 30% of their IT budget on technical debt management," Protiviti, 2023, "The Innovation vs Technical Debt Tug of War."
Salesforce has approximately 150 thousand customers and is growing its footprint within the enterprise with multi-cloud penetration. Without governance and management of technical debt, more automation means more risk and cost growth for Salesforce customers.
The Governance and Tech Debt Perfect Storm
Digging deeper into the causes and tradeoffs of managing tech debt, I have observed the following related and compounding developments.
1. The power and agility of the platform make tech debt accrual easy
2. Maturing and expanding cloud footprint in the enterprise
3. Lack of governance and focus on tech debt remediation
4. Economic cost-cutting pressures and SaaS growth stagnation
5. AI’s dependence on quality data
1. The power and agility of the platform make tech debt accrual easy
Salesforce is a low-code CRM and enterprise platform known for its powerful and flexible nature. However, in the absence of effective governance, tech debt will accrue. There are typically several ways to accomplish the same outcome, and well-intended decision makers and Salesforce practitioners often misunderstand "Agile" with "moving fast and fixing it later." As a result, older implementations commonly accumulate inconsistent design and implementation choices caused by staff turnover and lack of sufficient system documentation.
A healthy Salesforce implementation requires balanced input from knowledgeable business and technology experts. As the saying goes, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
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