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Gaining competitive advantage through high-quality web content
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September 01, 2003
Web offers new opportunities for communications manager
By Gerry McGovern
The Web is having a major impact on business communications. In many organizations, communications has been seen as a backwater. The communications department was a cost center. With the Web, communications can increase productivity. It can help deliver new value. This has a significant impact on the role of the communications manager.
About twenty years ago, the IT manager's job began to change. Organizations began to see IT as a way to establish competitive advantage. As IT spending increased, so too did the importance of the IT manager. With the Nineties dot com boom, IT took on an almost mystical role. For a while, all you had to do was launch a website and your stock price doubled.
The dot com bust heralded more than just a temporary setback for the IT industry. IT is fast becoming commoditized. The idea that investing in IT is a strategy in itself has been shown to be shallow. As Jim Collins pointed out in his excellent book, Good to Great, "Technology cannot turn a good enterprise into a great one, nor by itself prevent disaster."
This is not to say that IT is no longer relevant. Like electricity, you can't do without it. But few organizations see electricity as a competitive advantage anymore. In the same way, the Web is changing. Eight years ago, managing a large website was a major technical challenge. Today, technology is more robust and commoditized. The challenge has shifted.
Today, the best websites are focusing on publishing content that creates competitive advantage. Consequently, there is a shift in who is responsible for the Web. Communications managers have the opportunity to achieve a lot more responsibility. The question is: Are they up for such new challenges?
The Web is about content and, historically, content has been seen as a cost rather than value center. If communications managers want to embrace the new opportunities, they must rise to new challenges. They will have to develop much better business cases for content. They will have to measure the cost and value of content in a much more comprehensive manner.
A senior manager recently told me that content was all well and good, but he needed applications on his intranet. In his eyes, content was not productive, but software applications were. Communications managers will gain power as they prove that content is indeed productive.
I asked the manager with such a poor opinion of content to name the killer application on his intranet. After a few moments thought he replied that it was the staff directory. I asked him what was the biggest problem with the staff directory? "It's out-of-date," he replied immediately.
What good is staff directory software if the content is out-of-date? A staff directory is a publication. Keeping it up-to-date is a publishing challenge. The IT department has been able to justify investment in staff directory software. However, in a great many organizations, the communications department has been unable to justify the investment in keeping it up-to-date with quality content.
Content can be productive or non-productive. It can save time or waste time, create value or waste value, make money or waste money. The new communications manager changes the view of content from a cost center to a value center.
Gerry McGovern
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