No jobs for senior Whitehall webbies?

At No10 there’s a Head of Strategic and Digital Communications in Mark Flanagan at G5. It’s certainly not a 50/50 split but it’s tacit recognition of the importance of digital at the PMO.

My own view is that the gradeist structure of the civil service, and the traditional split of marcomms/press/digital, means its very hard to get progression beyond G7 for digital people. I see more room for roles within strategic comms units where advice is needed across all a department’s activities (digital marketing, social media, corporate web presence) but you’re right – they don’t exist yet. It is happening, but how long can we wait? Within 2/3 years we could lose another tranche of people if positions don’t start opening up.

Yes you could pay a consultant, but you end up with good advice at a price, when you need to embed people within organisations. The real effect of everything we do is organisational change. You need people in-house who understand this world to start the process.

We’ve lost a good advocate in Jeremy, my fear is that it could be the first of many.

Change is coming, from all sorts of different directions: Ministers who get it, enthusiastic SCS figures, media, Parliament, CIOs and IT depts who take a ‘if you can’t beat em, join em’ approach.

Though we absolutely need to draw on specialist help from freelancers and agencies now and again, I think it’s ultimately less effective to have these skills outside rather than inside – not least because the cases where the need and business case have been identified for the consultancy are not the most interesting ones, on the whole. And of course there’s the wasted money and time involved.

I’ve been pondering this stuff myself and am coming to the conclusion that we need to move these skills more into the mainstream, and away from the digital silo. Where I am, the problem is often as not managing expectations and channeling enthusiasm in appropriate directions which actually accomplish a useful purpose, rather than technology being used for its own sake.

Career paths: for techies, I think the CIO route makes a lot of sense, if they’re willing to grapple with the shared services agenda. For comms-types, I think you’re right that Directors of Comms with strong digital backgrounds will start to emerge, contrasting with the gradually diminishing importance of News experience.

But the really interesting option I think for strategists is that digital has a bigger place than pure Comms: it’s now about policy development, engagement, insight generation, customer feedback, enabling new delivery models and so on.

If we take a suitably broad view of the skills, I think we should all be aiming high: where I work, our Perm Sec was a former e-Envoy and ran a technology consulting firm, after all.

Steady on Neil, enough of the flattery already! Seriously Steph makes excellent points, all of which I agree with. The trick is embedding these skillsets wherever possible to gain legitimacy for digital, rather than extending another silo up the hierarchy.

So I think we’re saying this: apart from a handful of exceptions there aren’t any pure digital jobs above G7 …and that’s good and proper, because the real change will come from embedding digital know-how into the civil service more broadly. And so for digital bods at G7 ready for their next challenge that means branching out, not just up. Or getting out if they want to stay specialised.

Yes, up to a point. But there is also a broader issue that most of the digital roles in govt are confined to managing organisational websites / intranets. Any innovative use of the web for, engagement for example, is confined to the edges and not recognised as priority work. That needs to change.

I guess things are changing. I’m part of a specific unit within DWP Digital that’s tasked with online strategy and advice and (thankfully) takes me away from day-to-day web management and off into fluffy meetings… It’s led to me having some good meaningful conversations with people around the organisation.

And I don’t think it is all well and good as we need to have poeple in at G5 who really understand this world and are taken seriously to start the embedding process. That’s where No10 have got it right. Maybe it’s down to us to multiskill more and show some cross-comms knowhow and enhancements. But to do that, we need freedom away from the digital publishing coalface… I think Steph’s got that, and I’ve got it as well.

@Neil: Indeed, but you two, and poss a few others, are the exceptions. That needs to change beaause this stuff is more important than running websites long term.

@Jeremy you hit the nail on the head. We need scope to show that digital is a “total comms enabler” that cuts across all communication activity rather than a silo. In fact, it cuts across total business activity. Another worry is that we may find corporate IT trying to fill the gap… Yikes!

Although, trad websites are still bread and butter and there’s an awful lot of organisational change needed there too to see them become better maintained.

But yes, while running one of those behemoths you can’t also be innovating and orchestrating culture shifts. You can only tinker on the edges.

Where should these posts exist, though? Within depts or across them? What job titles?

And who do we lobby about it? Presumably Jeremy’s already done some of that and we should discuss it offline.

Within depts. My experience of the SCS is that they only really listen to their own… outsiders are viewed with suspicion (they don’t like others tinkering with their precious things). The titles are less important than the scope. As we know, corporate website managers are known by all manner of titles.

Scope should be one of cross-cutting digital media strategy. All public facing (and internal?) work must consider digital aspects at the strategic planning stage, not later.

Who do we lobby? Comms directors and strategy directors… perm secs? I know that Jeremy Heywood and Sir Gus are very keen on this. We just(?) need to get that backing and amplify it through Govt.

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In my view, part of the civil service problem is keeping creative people inside the system. Unfortunately, it appears that creativity and government and coexist only for short periods of time before lethargy and poverty set in.

I look at current state of the internet in regards to website development similar to the 1930’s with the automobile. At this point a lot of people have websites, but the amount of businesses and people who will require websites in the future will be 100 fold.

I think that for anyone in this industry who can continue to pay their bills by creating, managing, and developing websites and applications will be very well off financially in the future.