Technical Debt – Insights Into a Manufacturing SME Case Study

Due to data and its use being an upcoming source of value for all industries, the use of IT systems becomes increasingly important to the daily business of most companies. As digitalization efforts increase, some existing obstacles come into focus – such as technical debt (TD). TD is well-researched in the software industry, but not so much in other industries. This paper aims at answering the question of how clients of software vendors in other industries are confronted with TD by performing a case study in a manufacturing SME and using grounded theory to develop a theory model on how TD occurs on the client-side, considering the entire system landscape and its evolution.