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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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|In: Strategy and Tactics|Last Updated:

Is Chronodebt ever a good idea?

Chronodebt is the accumulated cost of remediating all IT assets that aren’t what engineering standards say they should be.

It’s what most of us have been calling “technical debt,” and I would too except that Ward Cunningham and his fellows at the Agile Aliance have already claimed it to mean “the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.”

Anyway, the short answer is yes. Taking on Chronodebt is, in many circumstances, exactly the right choice. The conundrum preceded the advent of business computing by at least a century, when, during construction of the transcontinental railroad, the Southern Pacific Railroad, was faced with a shortage of hardwood railroad ties.

And so, instead of waiting for enough hardwood ties to continue construction, it took on massive Chronodebt in the form of ties made of cheaper and plentiful cottonwood (“Cottonwood now or hardwood too late?“, KJR, 4/28/2003).

The cottonwood ties would only last a few years, but with them the company could generate enough revenue to replace them. Without them it would never have completed enough track to sell a single ticket.

The significant difference between this and most modern companies’ Chronodebt is that the Southern Pacific Railroad paid its Chronodebt off.

Chronodebt, like most other forms of debt, is neither good nor bad as an absolute. As with most other decisions, context matters. In the case of Chronodebt it all depend on what stage of concept development you’re in.

Imagine your “concept” barely deserves the term — it’s really more of a notion. You think it has promise, but you don’t have much in the way of supporting evidence to support it.

It’s time to bet the farm!

And it is, but only if you’re betting someone else’s farm, “someone else” is someone whose friendship you don’t value very much, and you’ve checked with your lawyers to confirm you aren’t at risk when someone else finds themselves farmless.

If it’s your kids’ college fund it’s time to launch Excel, or maybe Access, or an ISP’s generic eCommerce development kit.

If it isn’t all about you … if we’re talking about a corporate setting and it’s a proposal to try something new and different for which there isn’t and can’t be much data to bring to bear on the decision … then it’s still time for Excel, or maybe Access. Or, because it’s a corporation, perhaps SharePoint, or some SaaS product whose licensing terms aren’t too expensive and onerous.

It’s time, that is, for Chronodebt, because doing things the so-called “right way” probably means missing the opportunity altogether. And in fact we might not be talking about Chronodebt at all. Chronodebt in this situation comes from the danger of success, because it only has to be paid off if the idea pans out. Success is, to push the metaphor to the breaking point, the usurious interest rate charged for underinvestment, which wasn’t underinvestment until success happened.

Chronodebt is a good idea during the exploratory phase of innovation management. It’s a bad idea when innovations start to prove out. That’s when it’s time to replace the kludges and prototypes you built the new concept on with more robust and scalable alternatives … time, that is, to pay down the debt, which means investing in sustainability.

That isn’t the whole story, though.

There are times when a company’s whole business model starts to approach its use-by date. Imagine, for example, you’re CEO of a metropolitan daily newspaper and your presses are a major source of corporate Chronodebt. Time to pay it off by replacing them with something more modern?

Probably not. Like it or not (I don’t), newspaper print circulation has been steadily declining for decades and the more important metric — advertising revenue — is in even sharper decline. The best and most advanced presses money can buy won’t sell a single additional newspaper, or, more importantly, attract more advertisers.

As CEO, you tell the god Chronos to take a hike.

If, on the other hand, your on-line news site or mobile app are Chronodebt-bound, that’s another story entirely.

None of this is particularly complicated. And yet, especially in IT circles, we do have a tendency to consider engineering excellence to be an unalloyed and immutable good.

Sometimes, prototypes and kludges are exactly what the situation calls for.

And sometimes the right answer, although painful, is limping along on your ancient legacy systems until they crumble into dust.

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