By Paul Preiss
Let’s be honest: most organizations don’t really manage technical debt. They track it like a credit card balance that never gets paid down, piling up until the interest eats away at innovation, budgets, and morale. And here’s the kicker—half the time, leadership doesn’t even realize how much it’s costing them. It’s just buried in “maintenance,” “operational risk,” or “why everything takes six months longer than it should.”
The BTABoK calls technical debt what it really is: a decision problem. Debt is created not just by messy code or lack of refactoring, but by every short-term choice that trades off long-term value. Architects who want to be taken seriously must move beyond waving hands at “we have too much tech debt” and start using the lifecycle and practices of BTABoK to manage it like real professionals.
Step 1: Stop Pretending It’s Just Code
One of the first myths to kill is that technical debt is only a software issue. Yes, tangled codebases matter, but so do rushed integrations, neglected infrastructure upgrades, and lazy design decisions. BTABoK frames debt inside the Architecture Lifecycle. Every stage—innovation, strategy, planning, transformation, measurement, and even decommissioning—either adds to or pays down debt. Ignoring this wider frame is like thinking your mortgage only includes the bathroom.
Start with the Innovation Cycle. Too many “quick wins” are just long-term liabilities in disguise. Strategy and planning then become the stages where you decide, explicitly, what level of debt you are willing to take on to meet business needs. That means documenting debt in decision records, not pretending it doesn’t exist.
Step 2: Put Debt on the Balance Sheet
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most executives don’t care about technical purity, but they do care about value leakage. If your team can’t deliver new features fast enough, if outages are too frequent, if security holes are piling up, that is financial debt—just wearing a hoodie instead of a suit.
The BTABoK approach is to make debt visible in the same way accountants handle real liabilities. Use canvases, views, and roadmaps to connect the hidden cost of debt to business outcomes. Translate debt into velocity lost, time to market, and risk exposure. Then prioritize it just like any other investment. If you don’t, the “interest payments” will keep draining the budget while competitors eat your lunch.
Step 3: Manage with the Lifecycle, Not Heroics
I see too many teams tackling debt with heroic sprints of refactoring. A week here, a task there. It makes them feel good, but it’s just bailing water on a sinking ship. The BTABoK lifecycle offers a disciplined alternative.
- Strategy: Identify which areas of debt truly block value realization. Not everything matters.
- Planning: Build remediation into transformation roadmaps, not side projects.
- Transformation: Ensure governance activities track not just delivery of new features, but reduction of structural liabilities.
- Utilize and Measure: Use KPIs that reflect technical health—debt ratio, test coverage, cycle time—not vanity metrics.
- Decommission: Sometimes the best way to eliminate debt is to kill the system creating it. Don’t be sentimental.
That process ensures debt management is not reactive cleanup but part of ongoing value delivery.
Step 4: Train for Competency, Not Just Awareness
Here’s where Iasa training makes the difference. Too many architects “know” about debt but lack the hard skills to measure, articulate, and influence tradeoffs. BTABoK competencies—business technology strategy, design, human dynamics, technology depth, and quality attributes—all intersect here. A certified Iasa architect knows how to balance technical constraints with business priorities and how to explain it in boardroom language.
If your architects can’t tie debt decisions to value, risk, and strategy, then they’re not yet professionals. Training and certification are not about passing an exam. They are about proving you can handle debt like a surgeon handles risk—deliberately, transparently, and with the trust of society.
The Hard Part: Convincing the Business
Let’s not sugarcoat it: some executives will always see debt as “nerd whining.” But when you put it into the lifecycle, into the transformation plan, and onto the balance sheet, it becomes a business issue. This is the same lesson learned in finance: debt can be a powerful tool if managed, or a silent killer if ignored.
BTABoK doesn’t give you magic bullets. It gives you a discipline and a language to make debt a first-class concern in architectural practice. The rest is courage—the courage to say no to shortcuts that aren’t really shortcuts, to show leadership the cost of delay, and to treat architectural decisions with the seriousness they deserve.
Because at the end of the day, managing technical debt isn’t about cleaning code. It’s about protecting the future of the business. And that, my friends, is why architects exist.