Across the utility sector, there’s a growing awareness of something that doesn’t appear on a balance sheet but can quietly limit progress: integration technical debt.
Most organizations have spent years building connections between systems to meet immediate business needs: GIS to asset management, field operations to customer systems, data pipelines to reporting tools. Each of those integrations solved a problem at the time. But as systems evolve, many of those connections, built with scripts, custom code, or legacy middleware, have become fragile.
The result is a kind of invisible drag on modernization. Integrations that once worked “well enough” now require constant maintenance, slow down upgrades, and make adopting new technologies like AI or advanced analytics harder than it should be.
Reducing this debt isn’t about replacing everything at once. It’s about shifting how we think about integration itself, from a series of one-off projects to a sustainable capability that can adapt as the business changes. That means documenting what we have, monitoring performance, and designing integrations that are maintainable by design, not by exception.
The organizations I see succeeding in this space are the ones that treat integration as part of their long-term strategy, not just IT plumbing. They recognize that clean, reliable data flow isn’t a technical detail but the foundation for agility, innovation, and customer trust.
That’s the future we should all be building toward: a world where integrations empower progress instead of holding it back.
What do you think?