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The Overlooked Challenge of Knowledge Debt in IT

Information technology departments often focus conversations around “technology debt” on the need to regularly replace and update hardware and software infrastructure. However, there is another crucially important, yet often overlooked, component of technology debt – knowledge debt.

Knowledge debt refers to the gap between individual knowledge and organizational knowledge about how technology systems are configured, deployed, and managed within a specific environment. When new technologies are implemented, typically individual contributors take responsibility for deployment based on their personal expertise. Over time though, those individuals’ undocumented understandings and insights into the how technology works becomes "knowledge debt" if they are not effectively converted into organizational knowledge.

This knowledge debt poses huge risks as refresh projects and personnel changes occur. If individual knowledge has not been mapped to organizational systems and processes, significant contextual information can be lost which enables existing technologies to continue working smoothly. A lack of documented institutional memory around why certain implementation decisions were made can severely hamper risk management and capability development initiatives.

In order to mitigate knowledge debt when managing technology workflows, IT departments need to prioritize “knowledge management” alongside hardware/software lifecycles. Proactively converting individual insights into organizational standards, policies, and documentation can pay huge dividends during inevitable technology transitions. Furthermore, complex documentation need not be overly cumbersome if it is embedded into regular procedures. Even informal “tribal knowledge” transfer sessions among team members can slowly percolate individual learnings into shared understandings.

The key insight is that knowledge debt opens up technology risk and friction just as much as aging hardware infrastructure. As such IT leaders must dedicate time and strategic attention to capturing knowledge as well as upgrading equipment if they want to smoothly sustain and enhance institutional capabilities.

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