Technology Debt
The pandemic struck. Museum visitation plummeted to zero. After the initial shock, we rallied and pivoted to digital. Remember pivoting?
Livestreams. Virtual exhibitions. Online collections. Cloud databases. New things we boldly taught ourselves on the fly.
But now the bill is due.
That bill is called technology debt: the later cost of earlier tech decisions we grow to regret.
Like an IT hangover.
And it doesn’t require a pandemic. We were all accumulating tech debt before that, and we’ve been doing it since. Here are some examples that might feel a little too familiar to some of us:
> We make AV systems we later shut off, when nobody remembers the training.
> We make so-so touchscreens, despite everyone already having a better one in their pocket.
> We make media experiences that are highly immersive — yet highly unpopular.
It’s weighing on us. Budgets are tight. Staff are maxed. And the tech expectations keep growing.
Here’s the thing:
Our tech can do wonders for us. But museums aren’t tech companies.
If we want to solve our technology debt, we’ll need to get better today at making technology decisions that we won’t regret tomorrow.
Warmly,
Jonathan
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MtM Word of the Day:
Technology debt. The eventual costs and problems that can accumulate from regrettable earlier technology decisions. Tech debt arises when audiovisual systems, software packages, or media experiences are made without fully reckoning the budget and staff needed to later keep it working. (“Technical debt” is a subset of this term, referring to software coding decisions we regret later.)
