Is That the Thought Police at the Door?

Creativity may be in the eye of the comptroller.
For some internal stakeholders, new rules governing corporate home pages will make Singapore feel like Woodstock. For others, they will be welcome standards ensuring professional polish and control.

Here's a topic that may push a hot button or two: institutional home pages will soon be objects of close scrutiny, and probably varying degrees of regulation, at the highest corporate levels. For some of you, this assertion may represent the next vital stage in the Web's evolution, a fine tuning for effective corporate communications in the real world. For others, the notion of top management --or their non-technical designees-- calling the tune on WWW practice may be as welcome as a spritz of napalm. But whatever your response to the proposition, spend a moment in considering why this development is so likely.

The WWW will become a familiar day-to-day mode for information-gathering among media, securities, and research organizations. Early adopters among these opinion leaders are already accessing the handful of available media-rich institutional information bases on the Web. Tomorrow Web research will be standard practice in these communities.

Now consider the sheer variety of corporate materials that can and should be reconstituted for WWW publication, plus the range of skill sets --technical, esthetic, strategic, and organizational-- that should be marshalled to do the whole thing right.

It's not difficult to see why high-level accountability for Web publication makes business sense. And we all know where that will take us: WWW server infrastructure and content will be carefully shepherded from the top down. The powers-that-be in some institutions will embark on this mission knowledgeably, sensitively, and creatively; others will blow it entirely. Ham-handed executives are just as threatening to creative external communications on the Web as preachy techno-populists.

The best solution may lie in consensus-building. The organizations that learn to use the Worldwide Web for high-return outbound communication will likely be those adopting team-centered approaches that give technologists appropriate pride of place. The diversity and quality of skills that this revolutionary communication tool requires need to be primary drivers in building such teams, which in turn have to reflect a corporate vision --not the insularities of particular functionally-distributed mindsets in the organization.