How one state pays down technical debt

To begin paying down $465 million in technical debt, Colorado is starting with $53 million from the state’s General Fund.

That first installment will go toward two main use cases: getting out of the state’s leased data center and off the mainframe. 

“There are dozens of subprojects within that because of the work that needs to be done, but there was a defined business case, a clear risk mitigation, clear cost savings, and [they’re] a contained project,” said Julia Richman, deputy executive director of the Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology. The office scoped the projects so that they can be done within the three years OIT has to spend that tranche of funds, but “we have a couple of projects that will need to be funded beyond those years.”

In fact, she refers to that $465 million as a “floor” of the technical debt Colorado has across its technology stack. “Why I say that’s a floor is because we have, this past year really, done an exercise to understand on the application side what work we still have to do,” Richman said. “The first round of work was really understanding what we have full control over, and then the second exercise has been linking that to business decisions of agencies. We will develop another round of cost estimates to really understand the work at hand on the business-side applications.”

Technical debt, or the focus of resources on outdated technology, creeps up easily. In government, a common reason is that agencies consider implementation costs when buying technology, but not maintenance, operations and replacement. “A metaphor might be everybody bought these nice houses and then didn’t have money to maintain them, and you end up with this sort of dump of a house that you can’t sell, and you still have to live in,” Richman said. “That’s the condition here in the state of Colorado.”

There’s also the tension between operating dollars and program monies, she added. Given the choice between paying $10,000 for a new server or a grant program to fight opioid addiction, elected officials, especially, will “pick the thing that feels like it’s helping someone,” she said. 

For fiscal 2022-23, OIT made reducing tech debt its top “Wildly Important Goal,” stating that “our aging infrastructure and multiple applications at or near end-of-life impede our ability to advance and transform the government services used by Coloradans across the state.”

That’s a common problem nationwide, said Doug Robinson, executive director of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), and technical debt presents security, customer experience and workforce risks that states can’t ignore.

“We saw during the pandemic [that] you had these platforms that could not be flexible and scale to the demand of the citizens when their lives were at their worst and they needed state government services,” Robinson said. “Because we had outdated and nonscalable platforms, they weren’t available.”

A study by research firm IDC found that 30% of public safety agencies alone spend 10% to 25% of their operating budget on servicing systems that are “limping along,” said Alison Brooks, research vice president for IDC’s Worldwide and US Public Safety practice. Additionally, 60% of those agencies said that 10% to 24% of their full-time employees’ time was allocated to technical debt.

In October, NASCIO and VMware released “Application Modernization is an Imperative for State Governments,” a report that stressed application modernization, which it defined as “the transformation, improvement and migration of existing IT systems,” as critical to reducing technical debt.

The first step in reducing that debt is to take inventory of existing technology, yet 45% of respondents to NASCIO’s survey said an enterprise portfolio is not available or being considered. “How do you make decisions on addressing technical debt if you don't know the scope of that?” Robinson said. “That is coupled with a pretty robust enterprise architecture, meaning you need to have a roadmap or a blueprint for … the future state.”

There’s also an educational and cultural aspect to this, Brooks added. “State and local governments are used to working in the way they’ve always worked, and so there’s a cultural resistance that actually gets in the way of progress,” she said.

In Colorado, OIT faces yet another challenge: avoiding creating and accruing more technical debt while making changes. Two approaches the office is taking is improved governance and better collaboration with customer partners, such as looking for where agencies can use a shared platform or shared tools.

A third tactic is better procurement controls. Because each state agency can buy their own technologies, OIT has struggled to track them. 

Lastly, the 1,000-person office will hire 200 to 300 additional contractors and employees to help with the effort, Richman said. “It’s a huge uplift on the part of our team, and we are putting other priorities on hold in order to achieve this,” she said. “And that’s a challenge.”

Stephanie Kanowitz is a freelance writer based in northern Virginia.