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As in most cases, transgressions carry a built-in punishment. The examples
given will lead to trouble in the field and will reduce sales. It's probably
best to deal with them on this basis, and leave moral judgment to higher
powers.
In the first case, management is assuming that financial institutions are
ignorant of the security weaknesses in Internet Explorer, and in general
won't discover security flaws on their own. This is extremely naive -- it's
equivalent to thinking that you can hide a heart murmur from your doctor by
failing to mention it.
If I were in this position, I'd mosey on down to the Sales department and
make sure the sales force knew what was what. There's a difference between
what's disclosed to the customer and what's written down, and Sales can
often pull Marketing's chestnuts out of the fire with a few quiet words to
the customer. Often, when the customer "discovers" a flaw after having it
pointed out by Sales, Sales can come back with the word from the field that
the flaw is absolutely unacceptable, and it will quickly be fixed. But they
can't do this song and dance until they know the flaw is there.
As a writer, I am not generally the person who decides which things get
written down and which are disclosed verbally, though it's part of my job to
give my opinion.
In the second example, the company president wants the documentation written
the way he feels the product ought to work, rather than the way it really
works. This will cause endless trouble in the field if the product isn't
updated immediately to match the documentation. One shouldn't jump to the
conclusion that the president will let the issue stop here. He might take
the updated documentation, amble down to Engineering, and tell them to make
their product match the description. Or he might not. Certainly it is once
again time to alert the affected parties that something is up. In this case,
Sales, Marketing, and Engineering are all affected parties.
How openly these messages should be sent is up to you. Personally, I like
running a Tech Pubs department that is as transparent as glass, where no two
people receive a different story from me. In the first case, I would tell
Sales, and then tell the offending manager that I'd talked to Sales about
it, to avoid giving him the opportunity of forbidding me to do so. Of
course, if the manager were of a vindictive temperament, I wouldn't tell him
squat. In the second case, alerting people to the will of the president is
non-controversial, so I would cc him on the alerting e-mail.
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