Eliminating technical debt and transforming public services for the better (Guest blog by Kyndryl)
Digital transformation projects are a vast, complex undertaking for any organisation. While it’s long been a goal of the UK Government to revitalise its services, there are a complex mix of issues impeding the digital transformation of public sector services nationwide. Legal constraints, skills shortages, fiscal limitations and deeply embedded legacy tech are amongst the barriers to innovation. Another is technical debt, which means many departments are starting from a place far behind that of their commercial counterparts.
Technical debt is the cost incurred when organisations overlook or defer issues that will impact them further down the line. The public sector has built up technical debt over a number of years, for a number of reasons. Ongoing budget constraints and lack of resources has meant that long-term, labour-intensive maintenance and modernisation projects have been set aside in favour of ‘quick wins’.
Many public sector systems are built on legacy platforms that have undergone various customisations over the years. These systems not only support mission-critical processes, which makes it near-impossible to have downtime approved for improvements, but they are notoriously challenging to unpick and migrate to modern platforms.
To address technical debt, public sector organisations must first assess which services are needed to deliver current policy objectives. Once this is clear, organisations can then design their Target Operate Model (TOM) to support these and implement processes and technologies that will be agile enough for the future, powering informed decisions on which technologies to keep, which to replace and which to adopt public and private cloud services for in a hybrid environment.
With a TOM in place, organisations have a number of options, ranging from in place modernisation through to scrapping their existing infrastructure to start anew. This could be a modern SaaS platform or a micro-service-based replacement application. Where suitable SaaS products exist, moving legacy services to these transfers the risks and costs of developing and maintaining underlying application software and infrastructure to the SaaS provider.
Where SaaS isn’t an option, building products on PaaS can reduce the risk of technical debt by shifting platform maintenance responsibilities onto the cloud provider. PaaS migrations can be time consuming, however, as they involve refactoring legacy applications to fit the platform offered by a service provider.
One of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to migrate an existing workload to the cloud is via an IaaS migration, or a “lift and shift”, because you move it in its current form and run it on cloud-native resources instead. This method is particularly useful where the technical debt resides in hosting locations and physical hardware. Alternatively, organisations could choose to slowly migrate a legacy system by replacing specific components over a period of time by creating a parallel new landing zone and slowly redirecting from the existing application.
Despite the challenges, many public sector organisations are recognising the long-term benefits of eliminating technical debt and digitising their services. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), for example, has recently partnered with Kyndryl to reduce network risk and manage technical debt as it modernises its systems and continues with its journey to adopt cloud technology. This transformation will improve the running of their critical services, benefiting all UK citizens. With better understanding and the right partnerships, we hope we can break down these barriers to innovation and help to provide better public sector services for all.
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Luisa C. Cardani
Luisa C. Cardani is the Head of the Data Centres Programme at techUK, aiming to provide a collective voice for UK operators and working with government to improve business environment for the data centres sector.
