A friend and colleague asked me to review a section of an already sent customer deliverable. The customer expressed strong negative views about the content and how it was communicated in one specific section. “The customer is always right,” and the customer also happens to be correct in their assessment.

I’m not throwing the person who wrote this material “under the bus”. Most people in IT and cybersecurity are not strong communicators. Maybe this person is usually a strong communicator but had an off day. Maybe sunspots interfered or Mercury was in retrograde or the U.S. tax filing deadline directed focus elsewhere.

Hello, peer review! Peer review should help level out the various stimuli and bias the original writer brings to the table. The message should be clarified, if the peer reviewers are worth their salt. That was not done here.

Hello, editor! Editing should take the technical skill expressed in the writing and translate it into art (a non-technical artifact with technical components) a customer will understand and hopefully embrace. That also was not done here.

A creative, visual expression of complex technical issues requires more than a good template and the liberal application of industry buzz words.