“And you put those two together and you start getting a better sense of where to focus instead of making it ‘mainframe bad, cloud good,’” he says.

The vast majority of technical debt, Briggs says, arise from IT leaders who had good intentions, knew they were making what they considered a justifiable trade-off when they made an investment, and thought they’d be able to update a technology in the next budget cycle but then didn’t.

“And now, the generations that follow are left…