Operational debt is what accumulates when systems continue to function without being properly realigned to how they’re actually used. Unlike technical debt, which is often associated with code or architecture, operational debt lives in processes, handovers, permissions, exceptions, and informal practices. It’s the residue of survival decisions—choices that made sense at the time, solved an […]

Configuration Drift: When Identical Systems Stop Being Identical Configuration drift is what happens when systems that were once identical slowly diverge over time, even though no one explicitly decided to change them. At the start, everything looks clean. Setups are cloned, procedures are copied, and standards are documented. Then real operations begin. Small changes are […]

Every business runs on a network of dependencies, whether it acknowledges them or not. These dependencies form a hidden architecture that determines how resilient, fragile, or brittle the operation really is. The visible parts of a business—output, revenue, growth—sit on top of this architecture, but they are not the architecture itself. What matters operationally is […]