[Music] we're back with the Enterprise agility podcast I'm John Lim and our experts Fred Champlain and Andy Jordan are here to address how technical debt needs to be addressed from a business perspective what are the strategies and costs associated with innovating transforming and delivering business value all in order to optimize strategic success Fred how does technical debt factor in for the scenario usually is unfortunately is an impediment uh to business initiative so that's why we are very focused on on this topic of technical debt uh which underlies the the whole technology enablement of of business uh across the landscape so we want to make sure that uh we're not standing in the way of or impeding uh the ability of a business to make decisions that are really business decisions for competitiveness for uh Fitness to Market uh if you're a product uh product Fitness we want to make sure that we're enough uh ahead of the game and we have enough visibility uh to ensure that we're staying out of the way if you will so it's the from a technology perspective we want to make sure that the constraint is not our technology investment that we're instead really focused on maintaining flow of value uh for customer experiences for products and that the business has the flexibility to make decisions and make those pivots as determined by the market as determined by customer uh desire and and opportunities that we see in the market from a competitive perspective and we don't want to have to be uh considering or held back if you will that our technology just isn't right there at the right time or it's going to be too expensive or we didn't anticipate an issue uh we don't want to be controlled or constrained by that so we're really trying to make sure there's alignment uh with our technology Investments uh to make sure that we're very aligned to where the business strategy is at and ensuring that we can actually deliver on that business strategy and execute it and this is where the idea of Enterprise architecture can really make a difference right that by looking at all of those different elements the business strategies the processes the people the technology infrastructure the applications the data the security the governance everything that makes up a business and understanding how all of those pieces interact with each other to flow value through to deliver the business capabilities to create the the value streams then we have a better understanding of how different elements contribute to different business aspects and in the past we might not even necessarily have recognized that technical debt if it was even identified was impacting a particular area of business performance but now we're getting that more complete holistic view of the Enterprise through the concept of Enterprise architecture we better understand that cause and effect and we can better diverge our our our investments or divert our investments to where they're going to make the biggest interest the biggest impact on what we need to do exactly and that that that's um absolutely right in fact the way excuse me that we do this um in in Enterprise architecture is uh by creating models and and so we can understand uh all the way from a value stream uh understand the capabilities are supporting the value stream the applications the services uh and the business processes that create those customer experiences the interfaces the touch points uh if it's it's a retail product or consumer product um and and so we really want to think this holistically uh end to end if you will uh and and look at that in the context of understanding the flow of value understanding that we want to ensure that uh we are absolutely doing the very best that we can to make the right Investments uh along the way and understand that we are continuously uh elaborating systems systems change over time they evolve and so we think about architectural practices um agile architectural practices for example where we know that there's always some emerging uh new uh design aspects we want to think about so the question always is is when is the right time to invest in those um do those align to the business to ensure that we're if you will staying out of the way but really being the foundational element uh and to do all that again modeling is really critical to understand those interconnections the inter relationships uh between systems because without a model we really are are not able to really understand the interactions and in complex uh Landscapes uh especially as you see the um Federation of Technology the componentization of Technology uh we really uh have a lot more entities that we need to manage and be aware of a lot a much higher level of interaction between components for example thinking about maybe Cloud containers uh and services microservices uh a lot of different interactions and event driven systems and it becomes quite complex so we need to be able to model and and and understand those uh to really get a handle on what those potential implications are from a a debt perspective and and not just modeling from a status quo or a point in time standpoint but the fact that everything is changing so rapidly is that a week two weeks a day maybe after you've done that model is out a day so that's why you need a solution like service now to be able to help you to manage those models to understand the implications to address those changes and that Evolution as it happens so that you're not struggling to play catch up you've got a platform that is helping you to stay on top of what is happening and what you need to happen that's right Andy and as we continue to to invest and build our our modeling capabilities and Enterprise architecture uh it's exactly where we're headed and that is to take the models inform them uh with the monitoring and operational uh data that we can bring back from it operations management for example and bring that Telemetry back in we can very quickly validate design decisions we can identify if we need to make a change uh we could also understand where those customer experiences are being impacted as well perfect well they you have everything you ever wanted to know about technical debt and even more reason to reach out to service now and become a custom if you're not already so Fred thank you so much for joining us over these last few podcasts I've thoroughly enjoyed it as always and everybody please join us again real soon thanks Andy it's been a pleasure [Music]