Most IT organizations face a constant balance between delivering approved projects (the top-of-mind, important tasks that management wants to launch) and fixing urgent problems (the ones that break systems in unexpected ways.) But there's a third bucket of issues—the long-languishing, forgotten, often boring tasks that turn into technical debt.

Take a step back from the Top Ten lists and join Saks' Veronika Durgin as she digs through the Bottom Ten: Neglected data engineering tasks that will come back to haunt you. This ""forgotten bucket"" can always be deferred, but the more you wait, the more time you'll spend on unplanned activities. And there are a variety of lenses with which you can look at it to better understand its impact on the organization, including the hidden costs of built-versus-buy, the need for a single definition of ""done"", identifying unexpected business dependencies; finding real data to conduct meaningful tests; and the environmental impact of your data.