Value stream costs must include the cost of delayed or forgone capabilities. The technical debt that limits an organization's agility represents a direct constraint on market responsiveness and investment in new product development.
Treat the AI invoice as capital, not expense.
Legacy system maintenance, when exceeding 50% of the technology budget, signals a material constraint on an organization's capacity for innovation and competitive posture.
Aggressive simplification through AI-driven code regeneration can achieve order-of-magnitude reductions in codebases, leading to substantial gains in maintenance efficiency and deployment frequency.
Accepting a defined percentage of edge cases, handled by human intervention and exceptional service recovery, is often more cost-effective than investing in perfect automation that limits system throughput.
The cost of customer recovery for rare edge cases should be weighed against the opportunity cost of protracted legacy maintenance. Often, the former provides greater long-term customer value.
Decide whether the AI line item is being audited or invested. The two require different organizations.
Value stream costs must include the cost of delayed or forgone capabilities. The technical debt that limits an organization's agility represents a direct constraint on market responsiveness and investment in new product development.
Treat the AI invoice as capital, not expense.
Legacy system maintenance, when exceeding 50% of the technology budget, signals a material constraint on an organization's capacity for innovation and competitive posture.
Aggressive simplification through AI-driven code regeneration can achieve order-of-magnitude reductions in codebases, leading to substantial gains in maintenance efficiency and deployment frequency.
Accepting a defined percentage of edge cases, handled by human intervention and exceptional service recovery, is often more cost-effective than investing in perfect automation that limits system throughput.
The cost of customer recovery for rare edge cases should be weighed against the opportunity cost of protracted legacy maintenance. Often, the former provides greater long-term customer value.
Decide whether the AI line item is being audited or invested. The two require different organizations.
After 20 years in software development, Norman is both a hands-on leader and defining the new age of AI SDLC for some of the biggest brands in the world — and exploring it with the builders. He writes here about things he is hearing and seeing. All posts are his personal points of view and do not reflect any employer or any customer he has ever had contact with.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the positions of any employer, client, or affiliated organization.
