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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.