Really interesting post from Paul Canning, discussing the recent assertion by Richard Steele, SOCITM‘s President, that web should be just another part of IT within organisations.
Paul says:
Web skills are very specific, you need to be across a lot of terrain. You need to understand SEO, usability, web content, have good people skills, be across various and ever changing IT, visual design, accessibility, marketing, PR … Even the very best IT managers don’t have this skill range so they can’t make informed decisions or informed choices across the range of issues which constitute good and most importantly successful web.
Good stuff from Paul, and of course I agree with him, being a web and definitely not an IT person. Indeed, I would a couple of bits to Paul’s list about webbies needing to be excellent communicators, and maybe a real interest in policy is important too.
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Interesting post Dave, I think to some degree you are both right but i have just posted a response which suggests an alternative, not good news for web managers, and i am one!!
Sorry Dave the link to the post is
http://carlhaggerty.wordpress.com/2008/07/14/should-web-and-ict-be-the-same/
Woaaah! Hold the front page!
Don’t expect any changes from SOCITM any time soon though. Anyone who has ever gone to a local authority with ideas on how they can improve their communication gets shunted off to IT.
They come back saying that – technically – the CMS that they have currently does everything that your proposal does, so it can all be done in-house……
This is why nothing much ever happens in local authorities – why they are consistently out-communicated by their rivals.