Socitm Blog

Last week I went to a workshop organised by Consumer Focus following its somewhat critical report on Directgov published at the end of last year.

It was a very good day, with lots of participation from senior people from Directgov and DWP and a range of other interested parties, and some good discussion about making public service websites more consumer-friendly. The day's events have been comprehensively socially reported by David Wilcox and his team.

Right at the end of the day, the issue was raised of the difficulty of hiring experienced professionals to manage significant web projects, certainly not at the public sector pay rates available for these roles.

In part the problem is because public sector HR and its grading and pay structures has not caught up with the multi-skilled, constantly evolving being that is the really effective web manager. Similar frustrations (but coming from the point of view of web professionals, rather than their employers) inspired Socitm to initiate its project to define a web skills framework. The project kicked off in earnest late last year, supported by webbies from across the public sector, and will publish a draft skills framework for consultation shortly.

It suddenly occurred to me, while I was listening to the discussion at the Consumer Focus event, that the web management role had something in common with the role of brand management in an FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) company. When I was at university at the end of the 1970s, landing a job in brand management with Procter & Gamble or Unilever or ICI was the top aspiration for ambitious people who didn't have the connections to land a job in a newspaper or the BBC, and wanted faster rewards than the fast stream of the civil service offered. (Weirdly, the City didn't feature much then, that was reserved for toffs or wide boys).

Anyway, brand management was considered a demanding role that needed really bright, confident people with a huge appetite to learn, because to do it well meant mastering the many different processes that result in a successful product on the supermarket shelf. The brand manager needed to know something about manufacturing processes and production engineering. They needed to understand distribution and channels. They needed to know quite a bit about packaging, and how to combine shelf appeal and branding with efficiency in manufacturing and distribution. They needed to be able to get the best from creative agencies designing branding and creating ad campaigns. And they needed to understand the consumer, commissioning the right research and interpreting the results correctly, and being aware of the risks to sales and reputation of changing anything - or of failing to change. And of course they need to know why they were doing all this in the first place - where their product fitted into the business, and its goals in terms of market share, profit, and return on investment. Oh, and they needed top communication skills, in order to persuade senior management to go along with their plans.

A similar breadth of skill, knowledge and understanding is required of web managers. They need to know more than a bit about the technology that drives the internet and its supporting applications. They need to be able to talk confidently with, and challenge, the coders and application developers designing the 'back end' of web-delivered services. They need to respect and understand the importance of the written word, and how bad writing, naming and headlining can ruin a website's usability. They need to understand how people use websites, and how to manage and interpret user and acceptability testing. They need to know, at least a bit, about branding and visual design. They must be able to commission and interpret research on web usage, whether from statistics or consumer research. They need to understand, and know how to exploit, the interface between the web and social media. And they need top communication skills to work effectively with people from the top to the bottom of the organisation, helping them make the most of this hugely powerful, constantly changing medium.

What's the point of the comparison between brand management and web management and does it have any value? Well, yes, I think it does. If the parallel is true, then it suggests that web management is a significant role with a vital part to play in the organisation's success. The person holding that role needs to be someone of high intelligence and capability who is expected and trusted to deliver on many fronts. Like brand managers, they will be well rewarded and can expect to go to the top.

It seems unlikely, in the short term at least, that the public sector will facilitate a fast track route into web management from university, characterised by the intensive, expensive on and off the job training that the private sector offers for brand managers. More likely, public sector web managers will work their way up, learning by experience from different web roles that demand more of less of the IT, design, research, content management, service delivery, communications and e-marketing skills that are required.

Which makes all the more important the work Socitm is currently doing to define and then promote these wide ranging 'web professional' skills. Watch this space.............