How Pearson's CIO manages technical debt

All of this contributes to your overall technical debt, which not only eats away at your budget but also puts incredible strain on your IT resources. Keen to address this, Wells and the Pearson technology working group, which includes tech leadership from across the brand’s different organizations, came up with 12 key attributes, including security and maintainability, to rate their technology assets in a consistent way. These tech debt audits provided a clearer picture of where their biggest risks were, which, in turn, allowed them to prioritize what needs to be addressed first.

“We developed an algorithm to measure our different applications based on these 12 categories so we can eliminate technical debt via a more strategic and standardized approach,” she says, noting that the goal was to do away with any guesswork and make decisions based on opportunities and potential revenue risks.

Objective frameworks

According to Wells, this exercise wasn’t formatted subjectively. They took a very systematic approach based on data and not on how they assumed different assets were or weren’t performing. They also created a dashboard, which provided visual representations of where the biggest issues or risks were so they knew exactly what to prioritize first. “While this might seem like a simple exercise, it really wasn’t because everyone was operating in a different way,” she says.