Your organization’s content debt costs more than you think. In this podcast, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Dipo Ajose-Coker unpack the five stages of content debt from denial to action. Sarah and Dipo share how to navigate each stage to position your content—and your AI—for accuracy, scalability, and global growth.

The blame stage: “It’s the tools. It’s the process. It’s the people.” Technical writers hear, “We’re going to put you into this department, and we’ll get this person to manage you with this new agile process,” or, “We’ll make you do things this way.” The finger-pointing begins. Tech teams blame the authors. Authors blame the CMS. Leadership questions the ROI of the entire content operations team. This is often where organizations say, “We’ve got to start making a change.” They’re either going to double down and continue building content debt, or they start looking for a scalable solution.

— Dipo Ajose-Coker

Related links:

LinkedIn:

Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

SO: Change is perceived as being risky; you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and processes that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Sarah O’Keefe: Hey, everyone. I’m Sarah O’Keefe and I’m here today with Dipo Ajose-Coker. He is a Solutions Architect and Strategy at RWS and based in France. His strategy work is focused on content technology. Hey, Dipo.

Dipo Ajose-Coker: Hey there, Sarah. Thanks for having me on.

SO: Yeah, how are you doing?

DA-C: Hanging in there. It’s a sunny, cold day, but the wind’s blowing.

SO: So in this episode, we wanted to talk about moving forward with your content and how you can make improvements to it and address some of the gaps that you have in terms of development and delivery and all the rest of it. And Dipo’s come up with a way of looking at this that is a framework that I think is actually extremely helpful. So Dipo, tell us about how you look at content debt.

DA-C: Okay, thanks. First of all, I think before I go into my little thing that I put up, what is content debt? I think it’d be great to talk about that. It’s kind of like technical debt. It refers to that future work that you keep storing up because you’ve been taking shortcuts to try and deliver on time. You’ve let quality slip. You’ve had consultants come in and out every three months, and they’ve just been putting… I mean writing consultants.

SO: These consultants.

DA-C: And they’ve been basically doing stuff in a rush to try and get your product out on time. And over time, those sort of little errors, those sort of shortcuts will build up and you end up with missing metadata or inconsistent styles. The content is okay for now, but as you go forward, you find you’re building up a big debt of all these little fixes. And these little fixes will eventually add up and then end up as a big debt to pay.

SO: And I saw an interesting post just a couple of days ago where somebody said that tech debt or content debt, you could think of it as having principle and interest and the interest accumulates over time. So the less work you do to pay down your content debt, the bigger and bigger and bigger it gets, right? It just keeps snowballing and eventually you find yourself with an enormous problem. So as you were looking at this idea of content debt, you came up with a framework for looking at this that is at once shiny and new and also very familiar. So what was it?

DA-C: Yeah, really familiar. I think everyone’s heard of the five stages of grief, and I thought, “Well, how about applying that to content debt?” And so I came up with the five stages of content debt. So let’s go into it.

I’m not going to keep referring to the grief part of it. You can all look it up, but the first stage is denial. “Our content is fine. We just need a better search engine. We can actually put it into this shiny new content delivery platform and it’s got this type of search,” and so on and so forth. Basically what you’re doing is you’re ignoring the growing mess. You’re duplicating content. You’ve got outdated docs. You’re building silos, and then you’re ignoring that these silos are actually getting even further and further apart. No one wants to admit that the CMS or whatever system, bespoke system that you’ve put into place, is just a patchwork of workarounds.

This quietly builds your content debt until, actually the longer denial lasts, the more expensive that cleanup is. As we said in that first bit, you want to pay off the capital of your debt as quickly as possible. Anyone with a mortgage knows that. You come into a little bit of money, pay off as much capital as you can so that you stop accruing that debt, the interest on the debt.

SO: And that is where when we talk about AI-based workflows, I feel like that is firmly situated in denial. Basically, “Yeah, we’ve got some issues, but the AI will fix it. The AI will make it all better.” Now, we painfully know that that’s probably not true, so we move ourselves out of denial. And then what?

DA-C: There we go into anger.

SO: Of course.

DA-C: “Why can’t we find anything? Why does every update take two weeks?” And that was a question we used to get regularly where I used to work at a global medical device manufacturer. We had to change one short sentence because a spec change and it took weeks to do that. Authors are wasting time looking for reusable content if they don’t have an efficient CCMS. Your review cycles drag through because all you’re doing is giving the entire 600-page PDF to the reviewer without highlighting what’s in there. Your translation costs balloon and your project managers or leadership gets angry because, “Well, we only changed one word. Can’t you just use Google Translate? It should only cost like five cents.” Compliance teams then start raising flags. And if you’re in a regulated industry, you don’t want the compliance teams on your back, and especially you don’t want to start having defects out in the field. So eventually, productivity drops, your teams feel like they’re stuck. And the cracks are now starting to show across other departments and you’re putting a bad name on your doc team.

SO: Yeah. And a lot of this, what you’ve got here, is the anger that’s focused inward to a certain extent. It’s the authors that are angry at everybody. I’ve also seen this play out as management saying, “Where are our docs? We have this team, we’re spending all this money, and updates take six months.” Or people submit update requests, tickets, something, the content doesn’t get into the docs, the docs don’t get updat...