What Boards Need to Know About Tech Risk
TechTarget, Tuesday, August 19th, 2025
Technical debt costs US companies nearly $2.5 trillion a year yet rarely reaches the board agenda.
DXC's Chris Drumgoole argues boards are built to evaluate opportunity and return, which blinds them to infrastructure investments whose payoff is the absence of failure.
The most disruptive risks are usually the ones already accepted as normal: deferred modernization, technical debt, weak AI governance, supply chain dependencies, cloud concentration, and thin recovery capability.
Accenture put the US cost of technical debt at nearly $2.5 trillion a year, and Deloitte's 2026 study found it consumes 21% to 40% of IT spending. He urges boards to drop green dashboards and ask operational questions about dependencies and invisible systems. Closing the gap also needs psychological safety so CIOs and CISOs report problems early.