Why do you care that I've just updated that application?

One of my tasks at the moment is to plan a significant change to a customer “desktop” infrastructure. A significant portion of this change will be looking at application management and delivery.

The technology is now available for us to make all sorts of changes without the end-user even knowing – we can be seamless. Technically, that’s what we can achieve now.

We have a worry though, what will the human impact of this be?

People are used to being disrupted by an application change, they complain about it all of the time, and rightly so. What we are discovering, though, is that the disruption actually gives them some value, and we are not sure how much of it to reproduce.

People feel attached to their personal device, even though it’s clearly a corporate asset they still feel that it’s theirs. The primary value in the interruption is communication – they know that the application has been updated. They don’t have a say in whether updates occur, but at least they know that something has happened to their device. Seamless changes mean that they don’t know and arguably that there is, therefore, nothing to worry about, but my concern is that seamless upgrades without communication start to breed a sense of mistrust – “something has changed and I don’t know what”, or “they keep changing things and I haven’t a clue what they’ve done this time”.

The other thing that the interruption does is warn the end-user to look out for things that might not be correct. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Sometimes they see problems in a change that weren’t caused by the change, but regularly they notice issues with the change that weren’t revealed in testing.

Interruptions also tell the end-user to look out for the new features that they have been looking for.

This is one of the situations where the technology is easy, but the customer experience is more difficult to judge. Any wisdom for me anyone?