Between December 2021 and January 2022, LeanIX surveyed EAs and IT leaders from more than 140 global companies. Per the survey findings, reducing technical debt is a clear priority for EAs. Technical debt – extra unplanned work a company needs to perform in order to upgrade or change technical systems – poses security risk, adds avoid cost to IT operations, and hobbles innovation. The survey found that EAs are eager to address this challenge:

- 96% of respondents acknowledged their company has at least one project planned for this year aimed at reducing technical debt.

- 52% of respondents said that retiring IT applications, which are no longer used but still consume resources, is the top initiative for reducing tech debt.

In addition to the risk and inefficiency associated with it, technical debt also impacts other critical organizational priorities and initiatives, such as cloud migration. 24% of respondents indicated that cloud initiatives should be a top IT priority. This relatively low number could be due to the fact that many companies already have at least some workloads in the cloud or have already begun their cloud transformation journey. When asked further about which cloud initiatives were most important, the survey found that 60% of EAs are focusing on migrating key applications to the cloud. Cloud migration, when done right, involves optimization for the cloud. Technical debt can get in the way of this optimization, so managing technical debt is a necessary complement to a successful cloud strategy.

The second most important cloud initiative (41%), according to the survey, is increasing the amount of SaaS in enterprise application portfolios. Replacing on-prem or self-developed systems with SaaS solutions is a tried-and-true method for reducing technical debt.