Let’s learn from our IT forefathers - Treat Maintenance as Primary Task!

In a recent conversation with Fabrice Cathala, we talked about a glaring blind spot in our industry. To traditional Systems Engineers, the technical debt we are dealing with right now is total déjà vu. But to the Salesforce world? It’s a brand-new crisis.

Our IT forefathers knew that maintenance was non-negotiable. Back in the on-premise days, keeping systems clean was just part of the job description. It was complex, risky, and required rigorous planning, downtime windows, infrastructure alignment, and rollback plans. Nobody loved it, but they understood a fundamental truth: Systems do not stay clean by themselves.

Then, the Cloud happened.

And it’s completely different for us. We all started to ignore maintenance unless we ran into a production bug. Because the Cloud reduced the immediate infrastructure risk, it prevented us from ever building the habit of upkeep. We treated Salesforce as if it would magically maintain itself forever.

Surprise, it doesn’t!

And right now, a whole generation of Salesforce Orgs are hitting the 5-to-10-year mark and actively breaking under the weight of their own accumulation:

• Ghost Town Features: Dead business processes still living in production.
• Technical Debt: Unused automation, duplicate record types, and broken validation rules.
• Data Swamp: Information nobody trusts, but everyone still reports on.
• UI Fatigue: Confusing page layouts and hundreds of forgotten fields.

The mess was easy to ignore while it hid behind a shiny Cloud login screen. But the Cloud didn’t eliminate the need for maintenance; it just allowed us to postpone it until the wheels started coming off.

It's time to stop treating Salesforce like a magical exception and start listening to the wisdom of those who built IT before us: Maintenance is non-negotiable.

True platform ownership means treating cleanup not as an occasional crisis project or a total rewrite, but as normal, routine work.

Our forefathers cleaned their systems. Your office needs cleaning. Your house needs cleaning. Your Salesforce Org does too. When are we going to start making maintenance a core part of the job?