Getting along with IT; it's the right thing to do.

Who controls the intranet or the web site in your organization? In a surprisingly high number of companies, that question is a bone of contention. Communicators naturally believe they should be in charge, since the intranet is a communication device. Information technology (IT) professionals think the intranet is in their jurisdiction, because the intranet is a computer network.

Who owns the intranet or the web site? The company does; it is a resource to be leveraged to the organization's greatest possible benefit. It is, in fact, a conceit that communicators view these systems as strictly communication tools. Many intranets also serve as an infrastructure, facilitating everything from expense reporting and performance evaluations to supply purchases and benefits enrollments. These are hardly the province of the communication department, yet are entirely appropriate for intranets. As for the web, electronic commerce falls in the marketing/sales jurisdiction. While communicators can play a role in both these areas, it is highly unusual to expect traditional, non-web performance evaluation processes and sales transactions housed within the communication department!

The fact that intranet ownership is an issue indicates that the real problem is the relationship between the communication department and IT. It is a relationship that needs to improve if the two departments are going to work together to produce and maintain a top-flight system. And work together they must. Neither department can do it alone, and neither should be subservient to the other.

IT staffers are not likely to read Communication World, so this article will focus on the communicator's role in resolving the conflict. That begins with understanding how the problem emerged in the first place. After all, it wasn't all that long ago that the relationship between the communication department and IT was limited to getting new computers installed and configured.

At fault, fundamentally, is the unprecedented speed with which the World Wide Web has become a computing standard. Previous technologies took years to roll out, according to Brad Whitworth, ABC, communication manager at Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, Calif. "But the web wasn't developed because companies determined they needed it," says Whitworth. "It was already there, and people started to bring it in." The more people began using it, the greater the demand for it to solve problems that no other technology could address. "It came upon people so quickly because it answered so many concerns."

Origins of the Conflict

The World Wide Web, as we know it, was born in late 1993, with the introduction of Mosaic, the first graphical web browser. Despite the simplicity of pointing a mouse at an icon and clicking, the web at that point was still the province of those who were already populating the Internet: academics and computer scientists. With so limited an audience, the web didn't hold much promise as a communication vehicle, so most of us remained blissfully unaware of it. But the IT professionals, who already knew and used the Internet, downloaded Mosaic and began toying with HTML, the scripting language that makes web pages appear the way they do in the browser window. They were merely testing the language, seeing what different scripting options would produce on screen.

Mosaic gave way to the Netscape Navigator and then, based on the web's growing popularity (fed by media interest), to a host of other browser brands. As the audience grew, the IT staffers who had been authoring web pages decided there might be some value to crafting a page or two about the company. They never claimed to be communicators, but nobody else at that point was much interested in the web, so they took it upon themselves to create these brochures in cyberspace.

As the volume of non-computer-specific content on the web increased, the audience expanded based on their desire for access to the information. Bigger audiences encouraged more content development. The spiral drew communicators into the web, who discovered that somebody was out there communicating about the company without adhering to established standards. (If the communicators didn't discover the problem, the lawyers did.) Now, the communicators began requiring that web sites conform to the various rules governing trademark use, boilerplate language, how the company's culture was characterized, and all the other elements of communication that influence audiences. The sudden demand for control must have come as a surprise to IT, which had done all the work to bring the web into the organization and craft a site that didn't interest anybody else.

It only got worse. Soon, communicators were knocking on the IT door, insisting that the web was a communication tool, and that IT should relinquish its claims. IT reacted, asserting its authority over a computer-oriented system.

Today, we are on the edge of a new phase in which communication departments will be responsible for the communication aspects of their companies' online tools. Some companies have made this transformation smoothly, but too many are still struggling with the issue of control. The issue won't get resolved until each department develops an understanding of the other's role in the organization. Until that time, communicators are likely to continue viewing IT people as engineering-oriented control freaks, while IT will regard communicators with the same suspicion as taxpayers see the tax collector.

Who Are These Guys?

The importance of the IT department has grown in tandem with business' expanded reliance on computer systems. Overall, investment in IT has grown from 3 to 5 percent of a company's capital budget in the mid-1980s to about 17 to 25 percent today, according to Hewlett Packard's Whitworth. With so many millions of dollars at stake, it's no surprise that management has sharpened its focus on the IT department's role.

In general, IT's charter in the company includes the following elements:

* Establish standards. It is easier for a company to get work done as a team if everybody is using the same system, the same software, the same file types. If you have ever worked for a company with multiple incompatible e-mail systems, you know how frustrating a lack of standards can be.

* Manage company-wide systems. Given the increasing reliance on systems, there is more work for the IT department to do. They have to keep the existing systems working, back them up, keep them upgraded, analyze prospective enhancements and replacements, and maintain a smooth-working digital operation.

* Address systems integration. In an environment characterized by mergers and acquisitions, there always seem to be divergent systems that need to be incorporated into the work place.

* Watch the horizon. An effective network comprised of the most appropriate tools for the organization can represent one of company's most significant competitive advantages. Companies cannot afford to be caught with their pants down as competitors embrace a new technology that erodes that advantage. IT is responsible for ensuring that the company is prepared to acquire and assimilate the latest offerings, and functions within the standards of an increasingly networked marketplace.

* Budget constraints. The IT department has to work within a budget, no differently than any other department.

* Year 2000. In many organizations, IT resources have been strained beyond reason by the need to make all systems compliant with Year 2000 standards. (See the article in the October/November 1997 issue of CW.)

Learn the Lingo

One source of conflict between IT and communication is the jargon IT professionals seem to bandy about with arrogant supremacy. Much of the language they speak seems contrived to confound all outsiders. In fact, the jargon is simply the language of computers and networking. It's really no different, in terms of how difficult it is to learn, than the jargon associated with printing. Most communicators would have no difficulty understanding the following sentence: "I'm going four-up on a sheet-fed, two-over-four with spot varnish, a die cut, and the whole thing's gonna be perfect bound." Yet few communicators are qualified offset press operators. As professionals, we communicators simply have learned enough of the technical side of printing as we need to work with our printers and get the results we require.

IT professionals are the printers of the digital, networked world. Just as we did with printers, we need to learn enough about computers and networks to be able to work with the IT staff to get the same results. (Some of the key terms communicators should understand are in the sidebar.)

What Is "Content"?

Often, the friction between IT and communication arises over who will manage content. Just as frequently, there would be no disagreement at all if the two departments defined what they meant by "content." As communicators, we define content as subject matter. It is that material we craft to achieve communication objectives. It is the key message, the approach taken to the message, and the message's positioning within the communication vehicle.

When IT talks about content, on the other hand, they are usually talking about file types. An AVI animation file, for example, is "content" from the IT perspective. So is a WAV sound file, or a Java applet. These are a concern to IT, which may be nursing a network along that is bursting at its limited-bandwidth seams. Sometimes, a content provider may want to use a file type that is incompatible with the existing system. Do all employees in the company have an Adobe Acrobat reader on their computers? If not, it doesn't make much sense to load Acrobat PDF files onto the server.

Of course, you could make the case that Acrobat files would increase the value of the network and provide a substantial return on investment to the organization. Making that business case could lead IT to agree to install the reader on each and every desktop. It is that kind of discussion that helps the two departments move beyond the discord stage. Engaging in such discussions begins with making a mutual commitment to work together in the best interests of the organization.

Mutual Commitment

Sit down with your IT counterpart and discuss your objectives. IT needs to understand what you are trying to accomplish on the company's behalf, and how the intranet and/or the web figure into the equation. Listen to IT's objectives. With all your cards on the table, take that next big step: Agree to work together to provide the solutions that the organization needs to be successful and competitive.

Now you can build a cross-functional team with mutual responsibility for the success of the web or the intranet. (You don't have to call it a team. It can be a task force, a steering committee - a couple of companies have named their groups the "guild.") The team should take ownership of responsibility for the intranet or web site, since teams work better than a situation in which one department retains control and others are merely subservient to the demands of the controlling group. Teams establish their own sets of objectives, separate from those on which the team members are evaluated within the context of their departmental jobs. Once the team has established its objectives, each member works toward those common goals.

Further, teams identify the strengths each member brings to the table. Ownership ceases to be such an important issue; instead, the focus is on results. Few communicators would want to be responsible for wiring routers, writing interactive programs in C++ or Perl, physically increasing network bandwidth, selecting operating platforms, or installing software on every desktop in the entire organization. Conversely, few IT professionals would claim expertise in setting communication objectives, identifying target audiences or measuring the effectiveness of communication efforts.

But when the team is committed to the best organizational results, the objectives come first, then the discussion about how best to achieve them. IT can begin to propose technical solutions to problems that might never have surfaced in a more confrontational environment.

RELATED ARTICLE: Need a head start on learning the IT lingo? Here are some basic words you need to know:

Bandwidth - How much stuff you can send through a connection. Usually measured in bits-per-second. A full page of English text is about 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 15,000 bits in one second. Full-motion, full-screen video would require roughly 10,000,000 bits-per-second, depending on compression.

Client/Server - A client is a software program that is used to contact and obtain data from a server software program on another computer, often across a great distance. A server is a computer, or a software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can refer to a particular piece of software, such as a World Wide Web server, or to the machine on which the software is running.

Each client program is designed to work with one or more specific kinds of server programs, and each server requires a specific kind of client. A web browser is a specific kind of client.

Streaming - Audio or video that is sent from the server to the client in real time, so that the user views or hears the file as it reaches his or her computer. Streaming is a newer technology, replacing the former method of downloading the entire audio or video file before you can hear or view it.

Pixels - The smallest variable element on a computer display or in a computer image. A display screen has a maximum. picture size that is defined by the boundaries of its physical size (for example, an 11-inch screen has a corner-to-opposite-corner distance of 11 inches) and the standard number of pixels specified horizontally 640 pixels, 480 pixels vertically, known as 640x480. Newer computers can handle denser pixel arrangements, such as 800x600 and 1024x768. Monitors also address the number of colors that can be viewed, which can affect the number of colors incorporated into a computer graphic.

Router - A special-purpose computer (or software package) that handles the connection between two or more networks. Routers spend all their time looking at the destination addresses of the packets of information passing through them and deciding which route to send them on.

Firewall - A combination of hardware and software that separates a computer network into two or more parts for security purposes. It restricts access to some areas of the site.

HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language, the scripting language of the World Wide Web. HTML looks a lot like old-fashioned typesetting code, where you surround a block of text with codes that indicate how it should appear. Additionally, in HTML you can specify that a block of text, or a word, is linked to another file on the Internet. HTML files are meant to be viewed using a World Wide Web client program, such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Compatibility - The ability of a piece of hardware or software to function as designed with another piece of hardware or software.

Standards - Emerging hardware and/or software uniformity across a broad spectrum of users. Windows has emerged as the business standard for desktop computer operating platforms, for example.

Shel Holtz, ABC, is principal, Holtz Communication & Technology, Concord, Calif. He will be a speaker at IABC's international conference in New Orleans, La., June 14-17.