Ever the IT eye looks outward . . .

I had an interesting conversation with a communicator last night. I was at the speakers' cocktail party at Ragan's Web Content Management Conference, talking to a guy who handles all the online external marketing for a software developer.

'Yeah, I mostly focus on internal communication,' I told him. 'You know, the employee stuff.'

'Oh, I do that, too,' he said. 'I'm responsible for the web site and the intranet.'

When I pressed him as to why he didn't mention the intranet right away, he gave it some thought.

'You're right . . . I guess I consider my primary job to be the web site—you know the thing that brings in customers and cash,' he said. 'The intranet shouldn't be secondary . . . but I guess it is.'

Upon further discussion, I found out that, while the company has an entire usability group and focus-group research team they use to test the external web site . . . they never do any of that kind of research or user testing on the internal site.

'There's no excuse for not doing it internally,' the guy admitted. 'We've just never done it. We've always focused on the internal site.'

I think this is probably a fairly common—though no less unpleasant—situation. The external site brings in the cash, while the internal site . . . what? Gets people forms? Hosts the internal phone book? Shows the stock table?

As communicators, we obviously need to do a better job of selling the intranet's benefits if we ever expect those outward-looking IT people, marketers and executives to pay any attention to it.