How Pearson’s CIO manages technical debt

A company that’s been around since the 1840s, Pearson has witnessed significant shifts in the education world and customer expectations. Modernization, therefore, is part of its DNA, and according to CIO Marykay Wells, making technical changes to an organization’s IT infrastructure is an ever-changing discipline that needs to be meticulously managed.

“If we don’t do this with a clear plan and in a logical way, considering all the technology assets and risks, negative things can happen,” she says. “First, you end up allocating too much budget to business-as-usual infrastructure rather than investing in innovations that can drive real business growth. Another potential downside of modernizing without a well thought out gameplan is that you’re reactive, not proactive, when it comes to addressing different issues.”

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.

Not only did this help Wells and her team come up with tech debt scores for the different organizations within Pearson, but it also provided valuable insights around what assets, applications, and products the business had in place so they knew how to map out their modernization journey more strategically.

“Where one organization had capabilities or a technology product that another organization didn’t, we could avoid duplication by bringing those resources together. In this way, we can maximize our resources to the benefit of the broader business and our customers.”   

Getting the board on board

As part of the process, she and her team needed to get the various leaders from across the business on board by making sure they understood that technical debt isn’t just a technology problem. “We really had to communicate that this is a priority, but we couldn’t do so by only talking to them about technology,” she says. “We had to talk about the impact of tech debt on our business. It was extremely important to start with a value discussion, a business discussion, and a discussion about customer impact, and explain that this will affect their customers and revenue.”

And the proof is in the results. Wells explains that Pearson was able to reduce the number of applications with high tech-debt scores by 55% in 2023, and enjoyed a 58% reduction in customer and employee impacting incidents the same year.

“I don’t think there are any CIOs from large companies who don’t have a tech debt challenge,” she says. “My advice would be to try to systematically make changes to your environment, rather than try to do so subjectively. You must remember that if you can measure something, it’s far easier to tell a story around why the project or initiative is a good idea.”