IT Experience Debt, The Silent Killer of Digital Transformation and Innovation

IT experience debt can be fatal to your organization, to the point that it can be considered a silent killer of your digital transformation (DX) and business innovation initiatives. It might be a new term to you, unlike DX. It’s to be expected when the focus to date on IT experience debt has been minuscule compared to the focus on DX.

Whether new technology – such as artificial intelligence (AI)  – is being added to your IT operations to improve IT workflows or for other reasons, the likelihood is that the new technology is being added to existing IT experience debt. It’s a situation that, if left unaddressed, will undermine the available benefits.

Everyone has heard of digital transformation

Much has been said and written about DX in the last decade. Then the global pandemic that began in 2020 was a catalyst for organizations unsure about the need for DX. Much was changed in business function operations, often using an IT service management (ITSM) tool as the platform for the digital workflow enablement.

But how much of this was the DX “paint by numbers”? The ITSM technology is simply added to the business function (or overall enterprise) status quo, and it misses the hidden cost of outdated IT processes and neglected digital experiences.

IT experience debt defined

As with any IT definition, there are likely many different versions available on the internet. For example, that IT experience debt is:

“The gap created when organizations fail to modernize IT processes, tools, and experiences in step with evolving business needs.”

If it helps, IT experience debt can be positioned alongside “technical debt.” However, it’s less about code, more about end-user experiences and operational friction. In particular, it can be present in your IT processes, workflows, and end-user interactions. Ultimately, it’s like financial debt – where you borrow money now, but you’ll eventually need to repay it with interest. Improvements made without a focus on experience will ultimately cause problems and make DX initiatives suboptimal at best.

How IT experience debt silently builds over time

If your organization hasn’t been actively looking for and addressing its areas of significant IT experience debt, it’s likely everywhere – in legacy systems (that end-users dislike), hard-to-use processes, a lack of automation, and end-user feedback mechanisms that are seen as “black holes” because nothing changes.

An obvious real-world example of IT experience debt in ITSM is the traditional IT self-service portal. These are often built around IT’s view of self-service rather than what end-users now expect and demand, based on their often-easier consumer-world experiences. They can be slower to use than simply calling the IT service desk, and the outcomes may still not meet end-users’ needs. Unsurprisingly, poor end-user experiences have led to lower-than-expected portal uptake and contributed to IT experience debt.

A less obvious enterprise service management (ESM) example is the manual onboarding of new employees, where the overall process and sub-processes are slow due to manual reliance. Whether it’s an HR, IT, Facilities, or another business function issue, a new employee without everything they need on their first day at work is a poor experience that, if IT-related, contributes to IT experience debt.

The consequences of IT experience debt can be seen in what the IT industry termed “Shadow IT” two decades ago – with end-users circumventing corporate IT services to use consumer-world solutions that better meet their needs (and without the aforementioned friction). The disconnect between what IT organization’s think of their IT services and what end-users think, if left unchecked, will continue to grow – with IT experience debt harming DX, innovation, and business operations more and more.

The impact of IT experience debt on your organization

As with technology debt, the business impact of IT experience debt may not be apparent initially. However, this can include:

• Reduced employee productivity and engagement caused by factors such as a lack of end-user understanding, outdated tools (including portals), and manual IT processes. These and other issues create friction for end-users in their daily work.
• Erosion of trust in IT’s capabilities because IT experiences feel outdated, slow, or inconsistent – resulting in “shadow IT” adoption and potentially associated security and compliance risks.
• Slower business agility and innovation because IT experience debt locks organizations into old workflows and user journeys (both in terms of “sticking with the old way” and insufficient time caused by productivity losses). This includes DX initiatives.
• Declining customer experience (CX) because end-user inefficiency results in customer-facing issues, including delays.
• Increased security and compliance risks caused by “Shadow IT” and the circumvention of agreed IT policies and practices.
• Talent retention and culture risks – quite simply, employees who are unhappy with the quality of technology support they receive in their roles will leave. It might also be harder to attract new top talent (especially digital-native workers).

How IT experience debt specifically kills DX and innovation

All of these IT experience debt impacts are detrimental to your organization. However, the effect of unaddressed IT experience debt on business agility and innovation – including DX initiatives – is a silent killer that may remain hidden for years.

Consider these potential DX impacts:

• User adoption is undermined, likely because employees already have poor experiences with IT, and they become skeptical of any “new” IT initiative. Leaders might assume the resistance is cultural, but it’s really experiential—and any organization will struggle to transform business operations on top of broken experiences.
• Trust in IT as a change leader is eroded, and DX requires IT to be a strategic partner, not just a service provider. Unfortunately, IT experience debt makes IT appear like a cost center when it should be a value creator for DX success. A likely result is the lack of a cohesive digital strategy – just islands of automation.
• IT issues consume the resources that should fuel innovation – think about it, when IT spends most of its time firefighting and maintaining outdated processes, there’s little bandwidth left for innovation. IT budgets and talent are trapped in “keeping the lights on.”
• The necessary feedback loop is broken, and because DX depends on continual improvement, driven by data and end-user feedback, DX initiatives will struggle to meet business needs. Ultimately, if IT doesn’t measure experience, issues will go unnoticed.

How to address IT experience debt

While this guidance needs a blog or more in itself, some key steps can be quickly shared that will help your organization to address IT experience debt issues:

• Employ continuous feedback loops that monitor digital employee experience (DEX)
• Shift from IT-centric to employee-centric design
• Adjust the status quo iteratively
• Employ proactive lifecycle management techniques to review and retire any outdated tools and processes
• Modernize your corporate technology to deliver better experiences, for example, migrating to an ITSM tool or platform that offers automation, AI-driven workflows, and user-centric self-service
• Prioritize small, impactful changes that help to build momentum for broader transformation (quick wins)
• Build IT experience debt into IT governance and strategy.

Address your IT experience debt now

IT experience debt isn’t just another management consultant term. Like technical debt, it’s a real barrier to IT and business change that must be addressed.