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Dear Dr. Yeahbut …

I’m a CIO. I’ve been reading your stuff long enough to remember when you introduced us all to the idea of “Digital,” even though you didn’t call it that. Now I need your advice.

Like a lot of companies that are going Digital we’re wrapping IT-based value around our company’s core products and services. Now, more and more of our sales representatives are asking IT for custom services they want to give away.

This was fine when the requests were for our largest clients and prospects. But no good deed goes unpunished, and our sales reps have been going steadily down-market with these requests, pointing out that our company culture emphasizes fantastic customer service.

I’ve tried explaining that it costs us almost as much to provide custom services for our smallest clients as it does for our biggest ones. But I’m having a hard time holding the line without creating the perception that I don’t have a “customer service attitude.”

Any thoughts on how I can keep IT from drowning in requests for freebies?

Dr. Yeahbut says …

I don’t know what you’ve already tried. Here are some thoughts, ideas, and notions that might be useful to you.

Free sometimes makes sense. You’re right to figure offering free stuff to your company’s biggest clients might make more sense than offering similar stuff for smaller ones. But (I am, after all, Dr. Yeahbut), they can also make sense with some smaller clients, namely, those with potential to grow to become a major ones.

The business model for providing fantastic customer service is that it leads to increased retention and “walletshare” – the fraction of the client’s total spending for what your company provides that you get instead of your competitors.

But even if that is the goal, if your company isn’t going to recoup the cost of providing the custom whatever-it-is, then logically the cost should come out of Marketing’s budget, not IT’s.

Establish an ABC cost structure for IT’s Digital services. In a Digital world, the potential IT “surround” for the company’s core non-Digital (would that be Analog?) products and services is, if not infinite, unbounded. To rationalize pricing, not to mention the self-defense advantages, consider dividing your suite of IT Digital Surround services into three buckets:

A services are core, standard services. You provide them at no additional charge.

B services are premium services. You provide them at a reasonable additional cost. You manage that cost by parameterizing the services to make them configurable.

C services are tailored services, the ones I imagine are eating you alive. Do everything you can to provide tailored services on a time-and-materials basis.

Unless, that is, you can satisfy the client’s underlying need with a B service.

Apply the Not-Yes/Not-No rule. This is the rule that says the two wrong responses to any request are “Yes” and “No.” The right response to any request is “I’d love to do this for you. Here’s what it will take.” Then explain what it will take, which includes advice on how to run the request through the established governance practices your company uses to set IT’s priorities.

It’s recursion time. If your company hasn’t already established governance practices to set IT’s priorities then a top IT priority is establishing governance practices for setting IT’s priorities.

Requests for free IT stuff should be added to the rest of the requests for IT-related services that are already sitting in the IT enhancements queue or appropriate backlog. There’s no reason a sales rep should be in a position to make requests for IT that don’t go through the same evaluation process as everyone else’s requests.

They might get favored treatment, but that’s a different matter.

Enforce TNSTAAITP. That’s “there’s no such thing as an IT project,” and in this context it means that the governance practices in question aren’t really practices for governing IT’s priorities. They’re practices for governing priorities, period.

Bob’s last word: Somewhere in all of this, someone will offer up as justification for the request that “the client wants this.” Please, and I can’t emphasize this enough, resist the temptation to reply, “And I want a pony. And a Robot Commando. And an Easy Bake Oven.”

Especially in business settings, sarcasm needs to be its own reward because all of the other rewards you’re likely to get won’t make you happy.

Bob’s sales pitch: Launching a project with a novice project manager? Give them Bob’s best-selling book written specifically for people who are smart and motivated, but who haven’t managed projects before, Bare Bones Project Management. Reviewers say:

“Hard to Find More Value per Page.”

“One of my ‘Top Ten’ Management Books”

“Bare Bones PM is awesome!”

“The author is fantastic; don’t let this be the only book you read by him.”

“I was a novice to project management and this book was a godsend.”

“Arrived on time; delivered at the correct address.”

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Sometime in the mid-1990s I discovered the difference between a premise and a plot.

The premise of the brilliant science fiction novel I planned to write was that what we now call augmented reality glasses had become popular, and cybervandals figured out how to plant what we now might call real-time deep fakes onto them.

In the first chapter an innocuous accounting clerk, having breakfast in a diner, is killed by an augmented-glasses-wearing vigilante who sees, via deep fake, the clerk pulling out a Glock, preparing to shoot everyone in the diner. A wave of similar crimes ensues.

The novel’s protagonists – Detectives Frederick Baltimore and Richmond Alexandria (named after two highway signs near Tyson’s Corner, VA, which at the time I thought was clever) – were charged with figuring out what was going on.

This was the premise, but at best all I had was the barest sketch of a plot.

Welcome to Meta, nee facebook, which wants us all to spend most of our lives in its “meta-verse.” It owns Oculus, the world’s most popular VR platform, along with most of the world’s social media audiences. And, it stands accused of not caring in the slightest whether the “information” it distributes to its audience bears any resemblance to actual reality.

Maybe it’s time for me to dust off the premise.

I’m also thinking it’s time for the world’s reputable fact-checking services to incorporate machine-learning AIs into their methodologies in order to scale their work to keep up with Meta’s reality-neutral content dissemination.

But mostly I’m thinking it’s time to make Frederick Pohl’s classic The Age of the Pussyfoot required reading for policymakers concerned with the various gaps we have in our society.

I don’t mean to minimize the significance of the wealth, income, and education gaps that are matters of immediate and serious concern.

But if Mark Zuckerberg succeeds in making his vision real, most people will spend most of their lives in a world that excludes the poor and disadvantaged from the augmented capabilities most of us will have at our disposal.

Call it the reality gap, and its leading edge is already upon us.

I’m not meaning to demonize either Zuckerberg or Meta (assuming the two are separable), or even Kellyanne Conway and her reality-gapped world of alternative facts. The leading edge has nothing to do with any of them.

The leading edge is the smartphone – the portable gateway to all the capabilities the Internet makes available. Those who can afford them are better communicators, more knowledgeable, and have superior access to potentially life-saving resources than those who can’t.

Awhile back I suggested the technique of asking questions backward, using as an example asking what the privileges of wealth should be rather than what our obligations to the poor are.

It isn’t too early to ask whether affluence should be allowed to become the prerequisite to participating in a society that’s increasingly virtual.

The Buried Lede: It’s also worth asking whether corporate information security departments have a role to play in all this. After all, most intrusions these days are the result of phishing attacks and related forms of social engineering. And phishing attacks are a form of disinformation.

On top of which, employees routinely use Google or facebook to look for information they need about one thing or another, which means the quality of day-to-day business decisions is affected by if and how well the organizations they work in are able to protect them from the misinformation, disinformation, and outright falsification they’re exposed to.

Sounds like an information security responsibility to me. Or else we need a new C-suite member – the Chief Reality Officer.

Bob’s last word: We have a word … malware … to cover all the various forms of attack bad actors make use of. We need but don’t have a single word that covers all the various forms of deceptive content.

I propose we call it malinfo. Use it three times and it will become part of your day-to-day vocabulary.

Bob’s sales pitch: My “IT 101” series continues on CIO.com with publication of the third and last article about technical architecture – “The secret art of technical architecture improvement.”

In case you missed them, the first two were, “Technical architecture: What IT does for a living,” and “Evaluating technical architecture: 11 key criteria and how to apply them.” I think you’ll find them both practical and useful. Whether or not you do, please let me know what you think of them.

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