Every organisation accumulates interfaces that were built quickly to solve an urgent problem. Individually they are reasonable. Together they become the reason a straightforward change now takes two quarters.
The symptoms are familiar: nobody can list every interface, failures are found by users rather than monitoring, and replacing one system requires touching six others.
Reducing that debt does not require a platform rewrite. It requires an inventory, clear data ownership, and a rule that new interfaces follow agreed patterns with logging and error handling built in.
Progress is incremental. Each interface brought under the standard makes the next change cheaper, and the effect compounds across the programme portfolio.