Nobody Knows What Dave Built

You know Dave. He’s the guy the marketing department snagged from accounting to create their dashboards.

Well, he built something from the ground up this time.

Maybe it automates quotes, moves customer data between systems, generates reports, or replaced the spreadsheet everyone hated. It worked, people started using it, and eventually the business started depending on it. Your business.

Then something subtle happened. Dave became the documentation, support desk, security model, and disaster recovery plan.

AI-assisted coding is making this more common. It dramatically lowers the cost of producing software. It does not lower the cost of owning software.

Ownership is where the harder questions begin. Who understands the dependencies? Who reviewed the code? Who knows what assumptions are buried inside it? Who is responsible when it breaks in a way nobody predicted?

A small team can now produce ten times as much software without gaining ten times the capacity to read, test, document, secure, and maintain it. The result is often more code, more dependencies, more pull requests, and more unknowns accumulating faster than anyone can reasonably review them.

And then there’s Dave. He isn’t even a software developer. He’s mostly a guy who’s got a knack for spreadsheets and an enthusiasm for AI. Do you think Dave knows how to securely maintain the software that your customer data is now rolling through?

The software may work perfectly well today. That doesn’t mean the organization understands what it now owns.

You probably don't need to rebuild it.

You do need to know what it does, where the data goes, what it depends on, who can maintain it, how it is secured, and what happens if Dave wins the lottery tomorrow.

That’s technical debt in business terms. It’s the risk you inherited while solving another problem.

Our Technical Debt Risk Scorecard helps identify where that risk may be hiding. Because the software may work perfectly well today, but the bigger question is whether your company actually understands what it owns and understands how to make sure it works tomorrow..

Find out in about 3 minutes.