Web Team Roles Changing?

June 23, 2003 | 1 Comments

In this week’s New Thinking, Gerry McGovern talks about how Web team roles and responsibilities are changing.

He makes some very good points and the gist is that increasingly it makes sense to have a company’s Web team located with communications. I agree in principal. Our Web team down at the hospital is officially located within Marketing and Communications, but it’s fairly obvious at times that there is a bit of a third dynamic in IT wanting to be involved. At times the line appears very blurred. To be honest all 3 groups could benefit from our services.

Being in Mar/Com I’ve noticed many of the things he is talking about, both from the Marketing side and the Communications side. There is lots of truth in there. Personally I feel like, at least in my situation, the Web team and the hospital would be best served as a Shared Service, like we had back in my Boeing days, that was perhaps most dedicated to Communications.

I mean, at the end of the day, the majority of our work is in the Communications area, often made a bit “cloudy” by the influence of Marketing or IT, but there is still quite a bit of work that falls on us that is outside the realm of Communications.

A side note. We’ve been able to talk Mr. McGovern into coming to Seattle and giving a full day seminar at the hospital. This will be geared mostly to the communications folks and writing/managing content for the web. It should be a very interesting time. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to ask him about our particular situation and how he feels about this stuff in a practical sense. Too often we read things on the Web from folks like Gerry that sound great in theory but don’t really have the real world application we’d like. After all, everyone’s situation is a bit different.

Filed under: Web General

Comments

1. Dave S. said:

I don’t think you’re isolated from the confusion even if you work for a pure web design company. There are countless splinter groups - some focus on usability (37 signals) while others are far more graphic and multimedia oriented (Juxt Interactive)

I myself work for a technology company that just happens to have a design component. That’s actually a shift from the late 90’s when it was more half and half. The problem about working for a technology company is that the communications/marketing side of things is given way less importance than it should have, because the uppers just don’t speak that language.

I can’t talk from experience about what it’s like working for a marketing company, except for the few times I’ve collaborated with one. I’d surmise from the outside that the opposite holds true - they just don’t get technology.

I don’t know that categorization is necessary, provided you have skilled and knowledgable superiors. The manager who will talk to both the coders and the marketing guys before making a decision is ten times ahead of the manager who makes up their own mind.

Posted on June 23, 2003 12:57 PM | #