Stop using ‘tech debt’ to refer to anything old

For a few years now, I have noticed a variety of people misusing the term “technical debt,” incorrectly applying it to almost anything that needs to be updated. Despite Shakespeare’s disregard for the importance of naming (“A CIO by any other name would still be ignored”), naming is strategically vital in enterprise IT. This is not just the complaints of a cranky journalist shaking his fist and yelling, “Words have meaning, darn it!” It is seriously an issue. When vendors, IT executives, consultants, or anyone else throw everything from legacy modernization, cloud shifts, mobile, virtualized environments, SaaS, agentic integration, and on-prem rebalancing into the same bucket as true technical debt, it confuses the issue. Far more importantly, shoveling very different problems into one category and then trying to fix the disparate issues with one approach is either not going to work at all, or will work far less effectively than it could and should. Also, this tendency plays right into the hands of tech vendors, who love when customers mislabel things, as it makes it easier for them to make more sales by riding the confusion. Sadly, IBM doesn’t have a monopoly on FUD as a sales st…

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