Survey Reveals: Technical Debt and Legacy Systems Crippling Business Growth
If technical debt and legacy systems are holding your organization back, you’re not alone. A new Morning Consult/Unqork survey found that these problems are serious and widespread. No longer just a cost of doing business, technical debt and legacy systems are a roadblock to business growth.
To understand the scope of the problem, Unqork commissioned Morning Consult to survey 500 business and technology leaders across financial services, insurance, healthcare, and the public sector. Nearly 80% (or more) of respondents say technical debt caused cancellation of business critical projects and organizational paralysis, delayed innovation, and increased costs.
- Legacy System
Aging systems that rely on outdated technologies or codebases that demand continuous effort to function (“keeping the lights on”), and that make the addition of new features slow, complex, and expensive. - Technical debt
The hidden or delayed cost that results when businesses choose a quick fix over a long-term solution, whether that involves new platforms and solutions or legacy software. Technical debt makes it difficult and expensive to add new capabilities and to manage core functions like performance, scalability, and resilience.
The not-so-hidden costs of tech debt
%
More than nine in 10 respondents said their organization is burdened with some form of technical debt, which leads to serious consequences.
%
Delayed/canceled business-critical projects in last 12 months.
%
Higher costs for software development & management.
Legacy systems stifle innovation
The cost of keeping mission-critical processes up and running on legacy systems is enormous, and a key contributor to technical debt, according to a majority of Morning Consult/Unqork surveyed.
%
Impairs the ability to launch new solutions.
%
Concerned about innovation paralysis.
Why so much tech debt?
Businesses are under enormous competitive pressure to bring modern solutions to market. However, they are struggling to keep pace, given limited budgets, the scarcity of IT talent, and the fact that they have so much code and so many different coding languages to manage. All those lines of code require skilled developers to maintain, change, or update—and to ensure that each new, existing, or updated application remains performant, scalable, secure, and compliant.
As our research shows, ever-growing tech debt leaves enterprises fewer resources for innovation, because they must focus so much on keeping the lights on.
And the problem of tech debt is a huge, $1.5 billion global problem, according to a 2024 Wall Street Journal report.
The persistent problem of code
Traditional low-code/no-code development promised not just to speed development but to eliminate tech debt by reducing the amount of coding required to build enterprise-grade applications. But to a large degree, the opposite has been the case.
Academic Report
Research Gate“In practice, software written on such platforms often accumulates large volumes of complex code,” according to a recent academic report, and that code is “worse to maintain than in traditional languages.”
The launch of generative AI solutions like ChatGPT led to speculation that, by generating code at lightspeed, businesses could unlock innovation by building more apps faster. Again, reality has fallen well short of those expectations.
Yes, generative AI may be a great tool when guardrails are applied. But it does not remove the underlying problem of code and the tech debt that comes with it. As research shows, all that AI-generated code can require painstaking, manual management, including security risks, quality and manageability challenges, and bugginess.
How Unqork tackles tech debt
Unqork was founded on a core principle—to eliminate code from enterprise development, and the tech debt that comes with it. Just as a cloud provider removes the burden of buying, implementing, and managing hardware, Unqork’s data-driven architecture provides a layer of abstraction that allows us to take on the burden of maintenance across the SDLC, from updates to security and compliance. As a result, our customers can focus solely on creating innovative solutions, all without writing a single line of code.
Now, we have launched UDesigner, a next-generation application builder, and Vega, a new high-performance runtime, that go the next step in tackling the widespread issue of technical debt—and unleash innovation in unprecedented ways.
To see how Unqork eliminates technical debt and powers legacy modernization, take our free guided tour.
To learn more, reach out to us for a live demo.
About the survey
Morning Consult conducted the study on behalf of Unqork between July 26 – August 2, 2024. They sampled 500 business and technology leaders across the United States in four industries: financial services, insurance, healthcare, and the public sector. The study was designed to gather insights into the challenges and opportunities faced in enterprise application development, technical debt, legacy systems, AI adoption, innovation, and digital transformation. The margin of error for the total sample is +/- 4 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.
