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Technical debt-related information asymmetry between finance and IT

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

This position paper proposes a new stream of research targeted at technical debt as a source of information asymmetry between finance and IT professionals involved in information technology investment decisions. Finance teams interact with technology teams in several ways, predominantly when business cases require review and during the annual budgeting process. During these discrete interactions, finance teams are required to digest large amounts of technical strategy and architectural information chock-full of technical terminology and diagrams. Typically, the estimates for effort are soft and risk is difficult to measure. It is within this context that finance approves budgets and projects that inevitably result in the accumulation of technical debt. This paper discusses some of the dynamics at work between finance and IT teams within large complex organizations when they meet to make technology investment decisions. In addition, future research is proposed aimed at reducing information asymmetry, thereby leading to improved IT investment decisions and better management of technical debt.1

References

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Kenneth J. Arrow. 1985. Informational Structure of the Firm. The American Economic Review, Vol. 75, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Ninety-Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, May 1985, pp. 303--307.
[2]
P. Avgeriou, P. Kruchten, I. Ozkaya, and C. Seaman. 2016. Managing Technical Debt in Software Engineering (Dagstuhl Seminar 16162). Paper presented at the Dagstuhl Reports.
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Ar. Ampatzoglou, Ap. Ampatzoglou, P. Avgeriou, and A. Chatzigeorgiou. 2015. The financial aspect of managing technical debt: A systematic literature review. Information and Software Technology, Vol. 64.
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Irving Seidman. 2013. Interviewing as qualitative research: A guide for researchers in education and the social sciences.
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Y. Guo and C. Seaman. 2011. Measuring and Monitoring Technical Debt. Chapter 2 in Advances in Computers, Vol. 82.
[6]
Consortium for IT Software Quality. 2018. Press release retrieved January 22, 2018 from http://it-cisq.org/cisq-produces-standard-for-measuring-technical-debt/.
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M. Harris, C.H. Kriebel, and A. Raviv. 1982. Asymmetric Information, Incentives and Intrafirm Resource Allocation. Management Science, Vol. 28, No. 6, June 1982.
[8]
I. Griffith, C. Izurieta, and G. Rojas. 2015. Preemptive Management of Model Driven Technical Debt for Improving Software Quality. QoSA 2015, May 04--08, 2015.
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Kenneth J. Arrow. 1963. Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care. The American Economic Review, Vol. LIII, December 1963.

Cited By

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  • (2021)The Influence of Cognitive Biases on Architectural Technical Debt2021 IEEE 18th International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)10.1109/ICSA51549.2021.00019(115-125)Online publication date: Mar-2021

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cover image ACM Conferences
TechDebt '18: Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt
May 2018
157 pages
ISBN:9781450357135
DOI:10.1145/3194164
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 27 May 2018

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Author Tags

  1. IT investment
  2. decision making
  3. information asymmetry
  4. technical debt

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ICSE '18
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Overall Acceptance Rate 14 of 31 submissions, 45%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)The Influence of Cognitive Biases on Architectural Technical Debt2021 IEEE 18th International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)10.1109/ICSA51549.2021.00019(115-125)Online publication date: Mar-2021

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