Just like discovering faulty wiring during a home renovation, technical debt in content operations leads to unexpected complications and costs. In episode 171 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle explore the concept of technical debt, strategies for navigating it, and more.

In many cases, you can get away with the easy button, the quick-and-dirty approach when you have a relatively smaller volume of content. Then as you expand, bad, bad things happen, right? It just balloons to a point where you can’t keep up.

— Sarah O’Keefe

Related links:

• 
  
• Technical debt in content operations
  
• AI in the content lifecycle (white paper)
  
• Collaborate with a content strategist to transform content operations
  
• Accelerate global growth with a content localization strategy
  

LinkedIn:

• 
  
• Sarah O’Keefe
  
• Alan Pringle
  

Transcript:

Alan Pringle: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about technical debt and content operations. What is technical debt and can you avoid it? Hey everybody, I am Alan Pringle and I’ve got Sarah O’Keefe here today.

Sarah O’Keefe: Hey everybody.

AP: And we want to talk about technical debt, especially in the context of content operations. And to start off, we should probably have you define what technical debt is, Sarah. I think this is something most people run into during their careers, but they may not have had a label to apply to what they were dealing with. So what is technical debt?

SO: We usually hear about technical debt in the context of software projects. And it is something along the lines of taking the quick-and-dirty solution, which then causes long-term effects, causes long-term costs. So Wikipedia says it’s the implied cost of future reworking because a solution prioritizes expedience over long-term design. And that’s really it. You know, I have this thing, I need to deliver it this week. I’m going to get it done as fast as possible. But then later, I’m going to run into all these problems because I took the easy road instead of the sustainable

AP: So it’s basically when the easy button bites you in the backside weeks, months, years later.

SO: Yeah, and with any luck you are aware that you’re incurring technical debt. The one that’s really painful is when you don’t realize you’re doing it.

AP: Right, or you didn’t know you weren’t part of the process when it happened. And I think this is kind of moving into where I want to go next. Let’s talk about some examples, especially in the context of content of where you can incur or stumble upon technical debt.

SO: So right now, the example that we hear actually most often is that any inconsistencies and problems in the quality of your content, the organization of your content, and the structure of your content lead to a large learning model or AI misinterpreting information and therefore your generative AI strategy fails. So essentially, because the content isn’t good enough, genAI you know, tries to see patterns where there are none and then produces some stuff that’s just complete and utter junk. Now, the interesting thing about this is that probably you are aware, at least at a high level, that your content wasn’t perfect. But the LLM highlights that it’s like, it’s like a technical debt detector. It will show that, look at you, you took a shortcut and it didn’t work or you didn’t fix this and it didn’t. And so here we are. Another good example of this is any sort of manual formatting that you’re doing. So you’re producing a bunch of content, a bunch of docs, a bunch of HTML pages, PDF, whatever. And in the context of that, you’ve got some step in there that involves cleaning it up by hand. So I get it sort of 90—95% is I just apply the template and it all just works. But then I’ve got this last step where I’m doing a couple of little finicky cleanup things and that’s okay because it’s just an hour or two and all I’m delivering is English. Okay, well along comes localization and suddenly you’re delivering in not just one language but two or three or a dozen or 27 and what looked like one hour in English is now 28 hours, you know, once time for English and 27 times again where you’re having to do this cleanup. And so all of a sudden your technical debt balloons into something that’s basically unsustainable because that choice that you made to not automate that last 5% suddenly becomes a problem.

AP: It’s a scalability issue, really, at the core.

SO: Yeah, in many cases, you can get away with the sort of, as you said, the easy button, the quick-and-dirty approach when you have a relatively smaller volume of content. And then as you expand, bad, bad things happen, right? It just balloons to a point where you can’t keep up.

AP: Yeah, and I have recently run into some technical debt, not in the content world, but in the homeownership world. And I’m sure this painful story will resonate with many people and not in a good way. But how many times have you gone to update a kitchen, update a bathroom, only to discover that there was some weird stuff done with the wiring? The plumbing is not like it really should have been. And basically you want to jump into a time machine, go back to when your house was built to have either a gently corrective conversation with the people who are building your house or just murder them outright because you are now having to pay to untangle the mess that was made 30, 40, 50 years ago. I am there right now and it is not a happy place.

SO: And it would have been, whatever it was they did was presumably cheaper than doing it right. But what they actually paid to do it the cheap way, plus what it would have cost to do it right, you know, would have been an extra 5 % or whatever at the time. But now it’s compounded because you’re having to, you know, in the case of plumbing, you know, tear out walls and go back and replace all these pipes instead. So you have to essentially start over instead of just do it. Another great example of this is accessibility. So when you start thinking about a house that has grab bars or wide doorways that wheelchairs will fit through, right? If the house was built with it, it costs a little bit more, not a lot, but a little. But when you go back to retrofit a house with that stuff, it is stupidly expensive.

AP: Exactly. And really, these things that we’re talking about in the physical world very much apply when you’re talking about software infrastructure, tool infrastructure as it can be bad.

SO: Yeah, I mean, there’s a perception of it’s just software, right? We’re not doing a physical build. We’re not using two by fours. So how bad could it be? It can be real bad. But that is the perception, right? That we’re not building a physical object so we can always go back and fix it. And I mean, you can always go back and fix everything. It’s just how much is it going to cost?

AP: Right, how much time and money and effort is it going to suck up to get you to where you need to be so you can then do the next thing that you intended to actually do in the first place? So yeah, I think this is something where this technical debt, sometimes there is no way around it. You inherit a project, you’ve got some older processes in place and you’re gonna have to deal with it. Are there some strategies that people can rely on to kind of mitigate and make it less painful? 

SO: Well, first I’ll say that not all technical debt is bad or destructive in a way. And the canonical example of this is if you’re trying to figure out is this thing gonna work, I wanna do a proof of concept, I don’t wanna see if the strategy that I’m considering is even feasible. So you go in and you take a small amount of content and you build out a proof of concept or a prototype, proof of concept like, look, we were able to generate this PDF over here and this HTML over here, and we fed it into the chat bot and everything kind of worked. And you look at it and you say, okay, so that was good enough. And because it was a proof of concept, you maybe didn’t sort of harden it from a design point of view. You just did what was expedient and you got it done. That’s fine, provided that you go into this with your eyes open, knowing where you cut the corners, recognizing that later we’re going to have to do this really well and we probably can’t use the proof of concept as a starting point, or it’s good enough and we can use it as a starting point, but here’s where we cut all the corners. You have this list of like, we didn’t put in translational localization support, we didn’t put all the different output formats we’re going to need, we just put in two to prove that it would more or less work. But I think you made a really good point earlier. So often you inherit these things. So you walk into an organization and you’re brand new to that organization and you get handed a content ops environment. This is how we do things. Great. And then the next thing that happens is that genAI comes along or a new output format comes along or, we’ve decided we want to connect it to this other software system over here that we’ve never thought about before, or, hey, we’re bringing in a new enterprise resource planning system and we need to connect to it, which was never on the requirements day one. And now you realize, looking at your environment, that what’s there won’t, you can’t get from what you have to where you need to be because the requirements shifted underneath you. Or you came in and you just didn’t have a good understanding of how and when these decisions were made because it was five or 10 years ago with your predecessor kind of thing. So. So how do we deal with this? It’s I mean, it just sounds awful, but it’s like you have to manage your debt just like actual debt. 

AP: All right, sure.

SO: Right, so understand what you have and haven’t done. We have not accounted for localization. We’re pretty concerned about that if and when we get to a point where we’re doing localization. Scalability. We are only going to be able to scale to maybe 10 authors and if we end up with 20, we’re going to have a big problem. So let’s just be aware of that when we get to eight or nine. But the thing is you always have technical debt that you identify that you know about this is hopefully unlike personal finance, you always have more debt than you think you have, right? Because in the content world, things change. Or in your housing example, like the building code changes. So they built the thing, umpteen years ago, and it was okay in the sense that it conformed with the requirements of the building code at the time, I assume. 

AP: Of course.

SO: And now you’re going in and you’re making updates and suddenly the new building code is in play and you’re faced with the technical debt that accrued as the building code changed, but your house, your physical infrastructure did not change. And so there’s a gap between where you need to end up and where you are, part of which is just time has elapsed and things have changed.

AP: Right, and that is very true of some of the requirements you mentioned in regard to content operations. Generative AI, that’s what, the past two years, if that, that wasn’t on the horizon five years ago when some decisions were made. it absolutely is very much parallels. And when it comes to personal finance, sometimes things get so bad, you have to declare bankruptcy. And I think that can also apply to technical debt as well.

SO: Yeah, it’s a, you know, it’s an unhappy day when you look at, you know, a two-story house and you’ve been told to build a 50-story skyscraper. It just can’t be done, right? You cannot take a, you know, a sort of a stick-boiled house made of wood and put 50 stories on top of it. At least I don’t think so. We’ve now hit the edges of what I know about construction. So sorry to all the construction people, you build differently if you know that it’s going to be required to be 50 stories. Even if you only build the initial two, so either you build two knowing that eventually you’ll scrape it and start over with a new foundation or you build what amounts to a two-story skyscraper, right, that you can then expand on as you go up. So you overbuild, mean, completely overbuild for two stories knowing you’re going forward.

AP: Scalability.

SO: But yeah, we have a lot, a lot of clients who come in and say, you know, we’re in unstructured content, know, word unstructured frame maker, InDesign, basically a PDF-only workflow. And now we need a website or we need all of our content in like a content as a service API kind of scenario. And they just can’t get there from a document page-based, print-based, PDF-targeted workflow, you can’t get to, and also I wanna load it into an app in nifty ways. I mean, you could load the PDF in, but let’s not. So you end up having to say, this isn’t gonna work. This is the, I have a two-story suburban house and I’ve been told to build a 50-story skyscraper. Languages, localization are really, really common causes of this. So separately from the, “I need website, in addition to PDF,” the, “We’re only going to one or two languages, but now we’re going to 30 because we’re going into the European Union,” is a really, really common scenario where suddenly your technical debt is just daunting.

AP: So basically you’re in a burn it all down situation. Just stop and start all over again.

SO: Yeah, I mean, your requirements, it’s not that you did it wrong. It’s that your requirements changed and evolved and your current tools can’t do it. So it’s a burning platform problem, right? The platform I’m on isn’t isn’t going to work anymore. And so I have to get to that other place. It’s really unpleasant. Nobody likes landing there because now you have to make big changes. And so I think ideally, what you want to do is evolve over time, evolve slowly, keep adding, keep improving, keep refactoring as you go so that you’re not faced with this just crushing task one day. But with that said, most of the time, at least the people we hear from have gotten to the crushing horror part of the world because it’s good enough. It’s good enough. It’s not great. We have some workarounds. We do our thing until one day it’s not good enough.

AP: And it’s very easy to get used to those workarounds. That is just part of my job. I will deal with it. You kind of get a thick skin and just kind of accept that’s the way that it is. While you’re doing that, however, that technical debt in the background, it’s accruing interest, it’s creeping up on you, but you may not really be that aware of. 

SO: Right. Yeah, I’ve heard this called the missing stair problem. So it’s a metaphor for the scenario where, again, in your house or in your life, there’s a staircase and there’s a stair missing and you just get used to it, right? You just climb the steps and you hop over the missing stair and you keep going. But you bring a guest to your house and they keep tripping on the stairs because they’re not used to it, at which point they say, what is the deal with the step? And you’re like, yeah, well, you just have to jump over stair three because it’s not there or it’s got a, you know, missing whatever. So missing stair is this idea that you can get, you can get used to nearly anything and the workaround just becomes, “Get used to jumping.”

AP: And it ties into again, there’s technical debt there, but you have kind of almost put a bandaid on it. You’re ignoring it. You’ve just gotten used to it. Yeah, you do. So really, there’s no way to prevent this? Is it preventable?

SO: I mean, if you staffed up your content ops organization to something like 130% of what you need for day-to-day ops and dedicated the extra 30 or maybe 10%, but you know the extra percentage to keeping things up to date and constantly cleaning up and updating and refactoring and looking at new and yeah so no there’s no way to do it and everybody is running so lean.

AP: I’m gonna translate that to a no. That is a long no. So yeah.

SO: And as a result, you make decisions and you make trade-offs and that’s just kind of how it is. I think that it’s important to understand the debt that you’re incurring, to understand what you’re getting yourself into. And, you know, I don’t want to, you know, beat this financial metaphor to death, but like, did you take out like a reasonable loan or are you with the loan sharks? Like how bad is this and how bad is the interest going to be?

AP: Yeah, so there’s a lot to ponder here and I’m sure a lot of people are listening to this and thinking, I have technical debt and I’ve never even thought about it that way. it is a topic that is unpleasant, but it is something that needs to be discussed, especially if you’re a person coming into an organization and inheriting something you may not have had any say in the decisions that were made 10 years ago, five years ago, and things have changed so much that might be why they’ve brought you in. So it is something that you’re gonna have to untangle.

SO: Yeah, sounds about right. So good luck with that. Call us if you need help, but sorry.

AP: Yeah, so if you do need help digging out of the pit of technical debt, you know where to find us. And with that, I’m going to wrap up. Thank you, Sarah. And thank you for listening to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

SO: Thank you.

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