Technical debt is created when software engineers knowingly or unknowingly introduce shortcuts or unsuitable choices in the development or maintenance of the software system, that will have a negative impact on the future evolution of the system until corrected. Therefore, it is crucial to manage established debt particular in the public sector. The aim of this study is to introduce Technical debt to the field of Digital Government. We create an overview of the state of the art of the knowledge on technical debt management, the methods applied to gain this knowledge, and propose a research agenda to Digital Government scholars. We conduct a systematic literature review, which focuses on the concept of technical debt management. Forty-nine papers published within 2017-2020 are selected and analyzed. We identify several gaps in the existing literature: 1) an absence of theory explaining the relation of events, 2) a shortage of studies conducted in the public sector, 3) and an absence of specific techniques such as observation to study actual technical debt management behavior.

Technical debt (TD) originally names the reoccurring phenomenon of shortcuts and quick fixes within IT development. TD saves time and resources in the short run but may cause problems and require additional resources in the long run. Managing TD is difficult, whether it is seen as a local phenomenon (residing in individual applications) or seen in a portfolio perspective. However, TD is not always caused by the individual developer and it does not always just affect one application. It may affect several parts of the IT portfolio; it may arise in the portfolio and it may be resolved by decisions on an IT-portfolio level. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework that incorporates TD into IT portfolio management (ITPM). We apply the framework on a case study to explore how TD can be created, reside, resolved and managed in practice in a portfolio-perspective. This paper contributes with a framework integrating TD with ITPM. The paper also provides empirical insights on practice regarding ITPM and TD and highlights implications for research and practice.

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