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I’m getting hands-on experience with DevOps.

No, not as a member of a DevOps team. It’s that I use Office 365.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Office 365, to the extent it’s possible to like this sort of thing.

Except that once a week or so when I fire up my laptop, I have to hunt for features that mysteriously moved from their accustomed spot on the ribbon when I wasn’t looking.

It’s like Who Moved My Cheese?, where someone moved the protagonists’ cheese to an unknown location with no obvious reason for doing so and little or no notification that it had happened.

So to all you hardworking DevOps team members, and especially to the fine folks responsible for implementing Office 365’s epics, features, and user stories (here at KJR headquarters we’re nothing if not Fully Buzzword Compliant (FBC)) …

To all you hardworking folks: DevOps’ CI/CD mantra can stand for Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery or Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment.

If it’s Deployment and what you’re Continuously Deploying includes UI changes, CD has a third translation: Continuous Distraction.

Which brings us to the serious business of self-promotion, specifically, the impending (September) release of There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project: A Handbook for Intentional Business Change.

User Interface and User Experience design is one (or are two, depending on your perspective) of the topics we touch on in the book. In it we establish what most businesses should establish as their core UI/UX metric: Annoy customers and users as little as possible.

Yes, yes, yes, Tom Peters is still flogging excellence and delighting customers as what you should strive for. And far be it from my co-author, Dave Kaiser, or myself to denigrate excellence or customer delight in general.

It’s in particular that we have some concerns, namely, the nature of many business relationships is such that customers have no interest in being delighted. If you’re among them, managing to not irritate them is doing well.

Trying to delight them inevitably results in more and longer contacts, when what they want are fewer and shorter ones.

And if you accept the KJR distinction between quality (absence of defects and adherence to specs) and excellence (flexibility, customizability, adaptability and the presence of desirable features) … if you accept this distinction, simply delivering what you promised to deliver — quality — might not be enough to delight anyone, but compared to your competitors and earlier self they might be pleasantly surprised.

Try to get inside your customers’ heads. When they’re looking to buy something, what do they care about? What do you care about when you’re looking to buy something?

While not a universal truth, the odds-on favorites are price and convenience.

Look at the big business success stories of the last few decades, and for every Excellence-and-Delight example (Facebook and Twitter, maybe?) companies that focus on price and convenience are making a lot more money. Google, Amazon, and Uber are three noteworthy examples. At least they are from the perspective of revenue. I’m thinking Uber will turn a profit before investors lose interest, but you never know.

Google is an interesting example because when we use it we aren’t its customers. We’re its product, to which it sells access to its customers, which are the advertisers who want to reach us so as to tell us their stories. Google makes buying access to us easy. Whether it’s cheap depends on the details of how you measure the cost of customer access. Certainly, it’s no more expensive than the other ways businesses have to gain access to interested buyers.

Amazon is more straightforward. Whether you’re looking at its bread-and-butter retailing, its Kindle books, or AWS, price and convenience are everything.

Likewise Uber. Compared to traditional taxis, Uber costs less and is a lot more convenient. Uber doesn’t delight its customers except by comparison. But it sure has thought through the factors that irritate ride buyers and has done quite a good job of minimizing them.

There are, of course, exceptions to the price-and-convenience rule. If you’re in the business of selling Lamborghinis, Ferraris, or Aston Martins, neither price nor convenience are what your customers are after. Likewise if you own a professional sports team or Marvel and its stable of superheroes. If that’s you, excellence and delighting your customers by giving them a great experience is exactly what you need to do, because the customer experience is what you’re selling and they’re buying.

If, on the other hand, you’re the purveyor of more prosaic merchandise, just not irritating your customers is a pretty high bar.

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|In: Digital|Last Updated:

No, don’t thank me.

Last year I proposed what I’m now calling the Shut the ‘Bots Up Act of 2019 — legislation limiting the First Amendment right to free speech to organic humans only.

California has just passed legislation that, while not quite so all encompassing, still takes an important step, making it “… unlawful for any person to use a ‘bot to communicate or interact with another person in California online with the intent to mislead the other person about its artificial identity.”

You’re welcome.

# # #

Speaking of rights I wonder if it’s time to recognize that states’ rights interfere, with greater or lesser seriousness, from your average company’s ability to do business.

For example: Every state in the union has its very own regulatory rules and regimes governing the same sorts of services. Fifty separate sets of rules place a significant compliance burden on companies that would have been happier to comply with any one set of rules — any — than with having to comply with all of them.

Except, that is, for the mega-providers who can afford a platoon-ful of lawyers to contend with these regulations. For them, 50 PUCs are a formidable barrier to entry for new competitors.

Getting back to California, it will have to figure out whether and how it can enforce its new Truth in ‘Botfulness Act against offenders whose ‘bots aren’t located in California, just as the federal government, should it decide to make foreign interference in our elections illegal (wait … it is illegal!) would have trouble enforcing a ban on foreign ‘bot-based interference when it comes from ‘bots located outside the 50 states.

# # #

More about free speech: Once upon a time I figured if you prevent stupid people from speaking, others might think they’re idiots, but if you let them speak they’ll remove all doubt.

That was when I lived in the Chicago suburbs and the ACLU defended the right of the National Socialist Party (aka the Nazis) to hold a march in Skokie.

But back then it was safe, because the Nazis were a harmless fringe group.

Sadly, that’s no longer the case and I’m a bit more cognizant that the line dividing speech from incitement is, although fuzzy, critical.

Nazis are still idiots, but their fringiness is steadily decreasing. Enough of our citizens are embracing it that we need to aggressively keep its promoters inside the speech/incitement dividing line.

# # #

The question of defending Nazis’ freedom of speech versus preventing them from inciting violence brings up an esoteric but still important notion. Call it the Principles Scaling Rule. What it is: Take any fundamental principle that’s near and dear to your heart. My guess is that when you think of one of these principles it’s in the context of a small, close to home example.

For example, in the Good Old Days the local butcher knew that Mr. Phillips loved pork chops. He used that knowledge to recommend them to Mrs. Phillips when she entered his shop. It was early CRM.

My principles about companies knowing their customers’ preferences are built on this model. The digital model that scales this up to millions of customers whose on-line behavior companies mine to their sales and marketing advantage? That’s more complicated.

The Principles Scaling Rule states that when you scale a principle, nuances and complexities start to matter.

# # #

Closer to home, where do you think the line is that separates your right to free speech from your employer’s right to restrict it so you don’t say or publish something that might embarrass it?

There’s more to this question than the speech itself. There’s also the question of how employers might find out about infractions. So before we get to freeing speech from employer interference …

Before we get to that we need to establish the line that separates an employer’s right to surveille its employees from their employees’ right to insist that whatever they say in their private lives is none of their employer’s business.

It’s an old topic, made new again by the digital technologies businesses use to mine social media so their marketeers know what customers are saying about their products and services.

HR can use the exact same technologies to track down employee-generated content and evaluate its impact.

And by the way, I’m hardly unbiased on this topic, given that I’m gainfully employed by an utterly marvelous technology services firm while also publishing books and articles whose content has little to do with the company’s official stances.

Utterly marvelous. Hey, you — the HR ‘bot — did you catch that? It’s a compliment! You don’t need to flag it. It can be our little secret.

Nooooooooo!

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