Technical Debt & Economics
80 posts filed under Technical Debt & Economics.
AI Data Foundation Check
Every AI roadmap I review gets the same first check: whether the data could go in a board deck unchecked.
Read →ETL Cost Benchmarks SME
An ETL cost audit cut a small team's bill by roughly a third. Same 4 patterns I always find.
Read →FinTech DORA Data Prep
DORA has applied since January 2025. The data plumbing behind its incident reports is missing at most FinTechs I see.
Read →Governance Added Late Fix
The data lake had 300 datasets and no owner list. The audit notice gave us 4 months.
Read →Cost Of No Data Contracts
A team of 8 data engineers spent roughly 30% of their week negotiating schema changes in Slack.
Read →EU Reg Overlap Decision Aid
We mapped NIS2, DORA and GDPR incident duties for one client. One incident record fed all three.
Read →The Temporary Pipe That Stayed
A "temporary" sync script ran for 18 months. It was quietly eating 20% of the compute bill.
Read →Data Reliability Over AI Speed
A plain statistical baseline caught model drift before any human would have. It took an afternoon to build.
Read →75% Belgian SMEs On AI Daily
Three in four Belgian SMEs now use AI daily or weekly. Most are running it on data they wouldn't trust for a board report.
Read →Databricks DBU Trap For ETL
Your Databricks bill is mostly DBUs. A lot of those DBUs run ETL that never needed Spark in the first place.
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