As we move into 2025, IT departments face many challenges while striving to innovate and stay competitive. Bernard Marr’s Forbes article, “6 Mistakes IT Teams Are Guaranteed To Make In 2025,” highlights critical pitfalls. Mistake #3: Creating Integration Complexity is a significant risk for small and midsize businesses.
This mistake often stems from pursuing rapid innovation without addressing technical debt. Layering temporary fixes onto outdated systems creates a cascade of challenges that hinder progress, a phenomenon we call innovation stagnation.
At Tangonet Solutions, we’ve seen how technical debt can quietly undermine ambitious goals – over many years and in many scenarios. Tackling technical debt head-on, leveraging real-world experience, and ensuring your IT infrastructure supports growth – give the best chance of success to innovate, not stagnate.
Understanding “Innovation Stagnation”
The promise of AI, machine learning, and cloud technologies has IT departments racing to integrate new tools and platforms. However, these integrations can create tangled webs of dependencies and inefficiencies without a strategy to modernize existing systems.
The issues include:
- Unmanageable Complexity: Temporary bridges between systems lead to fragile architectures. Yes….but there is also a question of just how “temporary” these solutions are, as well as how much fragility they introduce into the core technology environments
- Technical and Functional Debt: Each workaround adds more debt, making the systems harder to maintain. You often have to look back to move forward…to be backward compatible with the old while building the new.
- Suboptimal Resource Utilization: Resources are drained, managing old systems, leaving little bandwidth for forward-looking projects. Technical debt drags on internal teams. They want to work on the new but are simultaneously anchored to the old, creating frustration and burnout.
The Cost of Ignoring Technical Debt
Bernard Marr aptly points out that failing to address integration complexity leads to rising costs, poor user experiences, and stifled innovation. Here’s how technical debt exacerbates these issues:
- Increased Maintenance Costs
Legacy systems often require constant patching, diverting valuable resources away from innovation. - Security Vulnerabilities
Older systems may lack critical updates, exposing businesses to compliance and security risks. - Lost Revenue Opportunities
Our blog post on lost revenue and operational risks shows that outdated infrastructure can prevent businesses from meeting third-party integration standards, cutting off key revenue streams. - Employee Frustration
Developers spend significant time—up to 42% of their workweek—managing technical debt instead of creating new solutions.
Bridging the Gap: A Proactive Approach to Technical Debt
IT teams must prioritize technical debt management to avoid falling into innovation stagnation. Bernard Marr aptly points out that failing to address integration complexity leads to rising costs, poor user experiences, and stifled innovation. We agree, but how do you tackle the issue of bringing the older platforms up to today’s standards while building the next-generation applications and infrastructure?
Leverage Nearshore Teams
Agile development models and nearshore teams can accelerate technical debt resolution. They provide flexible, cost-effective resources to tackle even complex challenges. The nearshore and internal teams can blend together with the internal focus on innovation, architecture, and design. In contrast, the nearshore teams remediate, refactor, and rebuild to allow peaceful and productive coexistence between different applications and platforms, creating scalable, secure systems designed for long-term growth.
A Real-World Example: Clearing Technical Debt for Growth
One of our clients, who struggled with a 1.7-year backlog, is a testament to how addressing technical debt opens the door to innovation. By strategically clearing the debt, they regained the ability to develop new features, improve customer satisfaction, and position themselves for scalable growth.
Addressing technical debt helped another client integrate with third-party platforms, securing new revenue streams and enabling seamless acquisition integrations. Read the full story here.
Paying Down Technical Debt
As we embrace 2025, small and midsize businesses must proactively approach technical debt. Avoiding integration complexity requires balancing innovation with infrastructure readiness.
At Tangonet Solutions, we specialize in helping businesses tackle technical debt through tailored, phased approaches that drive results without disruption. Don’t let technical debt hold you back.
Schedule a call today to learn how we can help your IT team avoid costly mistakes and focus on building a future-ready infrastructure.
