WARNING: The following post contains some big sciencey words. The author accepts no liability for any headaches or scrabble arguments caused as a result of continued reading.
The current batch of buzzwords are getting a bit old and repetitive (seriously, say “taxonomy” again, I dare you…) so it’s time everyone learnt some new ones:
Domain Knowledge
This is a way of describing the information associated with a particular subject or thing. So if someone has good domain knowledge they know a lot about the subject at hand. This could be any subject really, such as how your internal finance processes work, how a website is laid out or how an account’s tagging structure is setup. If someone has a very high amount of domain knowledge they may be the domain expert or subject matter expert.
Technical Debt
This is a term normally used in programming. Technical debt is the price you pay for doing something quickly now instead of taking the time and effort to think things out fully. Need a campaign setup quickly? Don’t have time to name it properly or check with others where best to file it under? You’ve accrued some technical debt. Like a student loan, it’s very hard to pay back technical debt, once you have some the compound interest can quickly build up. The main ways to attempt to keep it under control is through documentation and refactoring.
Refactoring
This is the process of re-working things so that they make more sense. When applied to code in Computer Science normally the external appearance and functionality of the system remains the same; the code behind it is just cleaned up so that it’s easier to understand and maintain. The term can also be used in adops though to describe doing things like pixel audits, creating new advertisers/campaigns, implementing naming conventions, etc.
Setup Entropy
The word “entropy” generally means a lack of order, predictability and structure. A system or setup with high entropy is confusing and hard to work with possibly because it’s old, not following current best practice or has a high amount of technical debt attached to it. To borrow and rework from science: “in a closed system the amount of entropy can only ever increase over time or in ideal circumstances stay the same.” This is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and when applied to adops it means that an account’s systems and setups will only ever get more complex and messy unless some external influence intervenes (such as introducing a new tool, doing some refactoring, etc.). This coincidentally is the Second Law of Adops as well. The first is “the creative will always be late!”