Reality television is nearly 75 years old.
Shortly after World War II ended, your great-grandparents may have watched Candid Camera on ABC. Nowadays, Survivor is on its 43rd season and the genre continues to crank up the cringe factor with increasingly dubious show premises in hopes that they’ll stumble into a hit franchise.
Technology can be like that.
Organizations invest in ground-breaking technology solutions, then add patches, fixes, and enhancements over time. In the short-term, companies can achieve significant process and resource savings by building onto an existing solution. But in the long-run, legacy technologies struggle to keep competitive pace, the enterprise architecture takes on a life of its own, and the organization starts missing opportunities. This is tech debt — the bane of IT departments at just about every mid-market to enterprise business.
Gartner recently found that even in the face of “irrecoverable failure” of legacy solutions, many executives favor compounding technical debt by continuing to build on end-of-life systems, rather than investing in a new solution that better fits the needs of today’s business.
It’s understandable. Starting over from scratch is a huge investment, with a large potential downside if it doesn’t work. Executives facing the high probability of a recession are more likely to hedge their bets.
The answer, once again, is composability. At our most recent APIs Over IPAs panel discussion, IT executives from NetJets and OCLC talked over a variety of topics, including how to overcome tech debt by making the business more composable. If you couldn’t make the event, check out these short video clips:
Your end-of-life technology may not be quite as old as reality TV, but there’s no need to trail along with a has-been solution. Fusion's API experts partner with technology leaders from mid-market and enterprise brands to talk about the latest trends in modular applications. Find out how to get blockbuster results (without scary budgets) through composability.
Register for our next APIs Over IPAs event