Night of the Living Technical Debt

Brrrraaaaiiiinnnsss…Brraaiinsss…Brains!!!

Stop, no. It's Bryan…Bryan…B-r-y-a-n. Everyone spells it wrong. Oh to be a boy at souvenir shop in the 90's. No personalized license plates for me.

Oh well, it's fine. I have no deep seeded resentment toward the souvenir industry or plans to open my own souvenir company selling only strangely spelled names…no, that ain't me…

…

Whew, well that went off the rails a little bit. Maybe I did need that license plate.

Anyway…back to brains!

Ah yes, brains — the decades-old clarion call of the famished undead. Zombies! It all started in 1968 when George A. Romero unleashed Night of the Living Dead, a film that redefined horror and gave us the modern zombie. If you're a Walking Dead fan or just love a good zombie movie, you owe Georgie a big thanks.

What do all these zombie stories have in common? The past coming back to bite you — literally. Things long dead and buried rise again to wreak havoc. And in many ways, technical debt in your ServiceNow instance is no different: a slow-moving zombie apocalypse just waiting to happen.

The good news? Zombies can be managed. With foresight, planning, and consistent effort, your instance can survive the horde.

The bad news? Every shortcut — every quick fix, undocumented script, or over-customized module — is a snack for the undead.

SURVIVAL PLAN:

• Schedule regular refactoring sprints to clean up legacy code.
• Enforce peer code reviews to catch buried “undead” scripts before they spread.
• Keep documentation fresh — forgotten hacks are the jump scares of major releases.
• Prioritize debt that is a threat to uptime, security, or user experience.
• Stay out-of-the-box whenever possible — over-customization is like building a zombie nest in your platform. It slows you down, breaks upgrades, and makes your instance harder to defend.

Don't wait for the Outbreak: Take a look at your backlog. What’s lurking in the shadows? What’s risen from the dead that should’ve stayed buried? Start slaying that technical debt now — and resist the temptation to over-customize. Because in the zombie apocalypse of IT, survival depends on simplicity, clarity, and a clean escape path.