As a product manager working with development and in technical infrastructure teams, I deal with technical debt on a daily basis, so Geetika Tandon's recent article on the topic struck a nerve. As an information governance professional, it also made me think of the similar issues that arise with the petabytes of information sitting in our systems.
Tandon defines technical debt as updates applied for short-term gains without any vision for the future — and this lack of future vision is holding our organizations back.
When it comes to information, we can multiply the issues caused by technical debt by hundreds or thousands of times over, due to the massive amounts of information our modern digital business processes generate. According to Statista, the installed based of global data storage is expected to more than double from 5.8 zettabytes in 2019 to 13.3 zettabytes in 2024. Can we even wrap our heads around that size?
A zettabyte is 1 billion terabytes. At the beginning of my IT career 20 years ago, no one had terabytes of storage. We started talking about terabytes on a project in the early 2000s for a large EMC Storage Area Network setup. Now you can buy a 2 terabyte external hard drive for approximately $60. Meanwhile, it is not uncommon for organizations today to have petabytes of data to manage (1 petabyte = 1,024 terabytes).
The field or discipline of ‘big data’ provides us with an acronym for helping us understand the masses of information we are generating, the 3 V’s:
Now take into account the volume multiplied by the velocity and apply the old information governance term ROT: meaning redundant, obsolete and trivial information.
Kevin Parker wrote a great primer on ROT for AIIM in 2016. Read it and ask yourself: at what speed are we generating and adding tons of redundant, obsolete and trivial information to our information systems? This information not only eats up storage space, it generates overhead costs to manage it. And just like ROT always does, it gets in the way of our timely and appropriate use of good quality information, which plays a big part in business success. As Parker notes, ROT gets in the way of search, good quality analytics and compounds the already problematical issues of ediscovery across increasing volumes of information.
Related Article: Information Overload Comes in 3 Flavors: Here's How to Combat It
Let's return to the idea of technical debt, and the concept of short-term value or expediency versus a long-term vision of value creation.
