Forrester urges IT leaders to dump technical debt

IT leaders should reduce their legacy IT to help them manage the risk and uncertainty facing businesses due to global volatility, according to analyst Forrester’s 2026 Budget planning: prepare for even more volatility report, which recommends IT leaders to “declare bankruptcy on legacy tech debt” before they collapse into it.

The analyst firm noted that running continually on a tech debt treadmill is not helping organisations to move forward. “You’re struggling with paying down tech debt, but more gets added to the pile all the time,” analysts Sharyn Leaver, Eric Brown, Riley McDonnell and Rachel Birrell noted in the report.

They warned that technical debt both increases IT costs and risks while slowing down the delivery of new capabilities. Forrester urged IT leaders to outsource support for technical debt to a provider, which then enables the IT team to drive forward a modern IT architecture and delivery practices.

“Outsourcing the legacy tech stack to proven outsource providers will ensure operational reliability at a negotiated cost and free up funds and teams to build a modern, adaptive and AI-powered ecosystem that drives innovation and positions you for future growth,” the report’s authors said.

They recommended IT leaders develop a long-term IT strategy, which requires discipline to manage through the inevitable bumps in knowledge transfer.

Looking beyond reducing budgets for technical debt, Forrester reported that 86% of tech leaders expect increases to their budget for 2026. The analyst firm found that 14% of IT leaders anticipate double-digit increases, demonstrating substantial growth. The areas seeing growth in IT investment include generative AI (GenAI), product analytics and threat intelligence.

The authors of the report recommended that IT departments run low- or no-cost experimentation, which prepares the organisation to move fast when it needs to. The analyst also advised IT leaders to continue to test pipeline technologies that may not be ready to deliver big value in 2026, but which could be the next to deliver value in 2027 and beyond. 

Agentic AI is among the new innovations identified in the Forrester report. The authors suggested tackling task automation in a single application first, then across multiple business applications. “Start by experimenting with AI agents that only automate tasks within one platform; it’s safer to prioritise read-only/analytical apps to avoid the risk of breaking data entry or data quality rules,” they said.

As more agentic AI capabilities are added, Forrester said IT leaders should assess how analytical BI platform agents talk to the organisation’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) platform agents to deliver insight-driven actions.

Forrester advised IT decision-makers to pay close attention to the communication protocols used for multiplatform agent orchestration – such as the Multi-Agent Communication Protocol, IBM Agent Communication Protocol, and Google’s Agent2Agent Protocol – as these standards are evolving.

The analyst firm also suggested that business and IT leaders learn the pros and cons of using synthetic data for faster customer insights. According to Forrester, synthetic data unlocks new opportunities for conducting customer research at scale, especially when recruiting participants is challenging or data is limited.