If you ignore technical debt long enough, you can go technically bankrupt. Your ability to serve new markets and new customers depends on the ease of successfully delivered and managed application code. As your IT technical debt increases, the run cost of IT increases, leaving less funding available to support growth.

Other costs include impacts on performance. As code becomes more complex, it will begin to perform poorly. Often, no one has looked at the application since the early design phases, so inefficiencies are unavoidable. Ineffective applications cost you in more ways than response time and slowdowns (which also cost you customer loyalty).

This paper is for a C-suite audience and has been written to address four areas where technical debt accrues and how it should be tackled in relation to a transformation programme and achieving business agility.