Chamber š° of Tech Secrets #43
Continuing Resolutions
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A CR, or Continuing Resolution, is a type of legislation passed by the U.S. Congress to fund federal government operations temporarily when the formal appropriations process has not been completed by the start of the fiscal year. It allows government agencies to continue functioning at current or specified funding levels for a limited period, preventing a government shutdown.
The U.S. Congress has relied on CRs to fund government operations in every fiscal year since 1997. This means that for over 28 consecutive years, at least one CR has been enacted annually to prevent government shutdowns due to delays in passing regular appropriations bills. Between fiscal years 2010 and 2022, Congress passed 37 CRs.
Continuing Resolutions are the proverbial ākicking the canā. This has minimal perceived short term consequences, but long-term impact in the form of a growing national debt that effects everyone.
In 2024, 17.9% of US government revenue (income from taxes) went to servicing this existing debt. When compounding works for you, its magic; when it works against you, its merciless.
The organizational equivalent of national debt is what I call āEnterprise Debtā.
Enterprise Debt is the accumulated cost or burden of suboptimal decisions in an organizationās enterprise architecture.
What does your organizationās equivalent to this chart look like on the technical side? Do you operate with a CR mindset?
Some examples of Enterprise Debt:
Silo Debt: This project has to get done so we take the path of least resistance on everything, including integrations, and create a reality where anyone who needs to consume anything from us is going to have to wait for something point-to-point to be developed for them in the future. The data and business capabilities in this area are effectively hostages that need to be rescued by name on a project-by-project basis.
Short-term thinking Debt: We could move this application to the cloud, but it feels risky, so weāll just upgrade in place and leave that cloud problem to someone else in the future. <One year later> This application went to end-of-life on-prem and is going to be offered cloud onlyā¦ begin migration to cloud!
Data Management Debt: We need tons of people and money and tools to locate, understand, catalog, manage, transform, and re-share data because we didnāt make this a priority as we designed and delivered our systems landscape in the first place.
Micro Perspective Debt: We are having challenges with thing X, so we buy a system for that. Then we have a challenge with thing Y so we buy a system for that. Thing Zā¦ repeat. We donāt like Part A of thing X anymore so we buy system XX but donāt retire X because we still need function B and C from there. We never pause to take a holistic view of a domain and revisit how well technology systems are supporting the business.
Undisciplined Pursuit of More Debt: Using this tool is hard, and at my last company we used that tool and it was easy. Buy, implement, repeat.
Institutional Knowledge Debt: We havenāt touched those systems in agesā¦ in fact I donāt think anyone who worked on those even works here anymore.
No Docs Debt: We donāt have time to make that architecture diagram. We donāt have time to register our APIs in the developer portal. We just have to launch this thing.
As you see, Enterprise Debt can be the result of short-term thinking, difficult tradeoff decisions, real constraints, or rapid growth (people, processes, technology ā could come through the business growth or M&A).
Impacts
Consider the Iron Triangle in software: Fast, cheap, or good? Pick 2.
Enterprise debt tends to make things slower, more expensive, and more risky (Cybersecurity in particular) over time. That often results in a compounding effect with more outcomes that are āwe chose fast but it was slowā and āwe chose cheap but it was expensiveā.
Letās talk about AI. Organizations with brittle systems, data or integration landscapes are very unlikely to succeed with AI. How will the mighty AI help you operate when your operations depend on systems the AI canāt talk to?
Ending the Cycle
Ending the CR cycle in the US will either take heroic leadership or the occurrence of some catastrophic financial event. A mindset has developed that says āthis is normalāā¦ āthis is okā. āThis is how we operateā. We even celebrate the passing of each CR as a major victory of bi-partisan government.
What can we do to change the Enterprise Debt mindset, if it is present in our organization?
Stop the debt growth: The US has an issue with paying down the national debt because the annual deficit continues to grow year-over-year. Is your Enterprise Debt growing each year? Consider processes and solutions that can keep the debt from growing.
Understand where the debt is: Map the organization and catalog where Enterprise Debt is present.
Select areas of debt that matter: Use the beautiful map to determine which debts have the biggest current or potential impact. Being selective is key to building trust and credibility; nobody trusts the person who acts like everything should be perfect. Help identify and execute paths forward using architecture techniques.
Tell the story: Most of the work is here. Tell the story about the perils and impacts of the Enterprise Debt deficit / debt. Do it over and over again until people understand. Most likely, nobody is trying to destroy the companyās systems landscape with bad decisions, so help them see the impact.
Help: Can you help make some of the current challenges better by rolling up your sleeves and creating a shared win?
What to do when they donāt listen to you? Repeat the above. Hope and pray. š