According to analysts at Gartner, technical debt – which is often created when speed of delivery is prioritised over implementing the most suitable tech solution – will shadow CIOs through to 2023, causing financial stress, hobbling their ability to recover and forcing cloud migrations. Responding to the pandemic Some challenges you choose and some are chosen for you says Joe Pucciarelli, IDC group vice president and IT executive advisor. He notes that when the pandemic caused lockdowns around the globe, IT leaders had no choice but to make command decisions that led to a growth in technical debt. Tough decisions had to be made – and quickly – but they were made with an understanding of the consequences, and were explained to everybody involved. “It’s not like the CIOs went into the back room and made all these clandestine decisions, it was quite the opposite,” says Pucciarelli. “All the executives sat at the table and had frank and candid conversations around how to keep their business intact. They said the devil with the details, we have to keep functioning, so let’s do what we need to do right now and we’ll fix it later.”