i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

The metaphor of a women dominated text-processing department points out that there has been a centralized place several decades ago to process information that are meant for internal or external stakeholder - as described by Bob. This centralization - may it be intestinally or due to technological restrictions - enabled companies to enforce company-wide Corporate Communication policies and even Corporate Identities easier as nowadays.

Today, it is harder to enforce this not just because of the computer-induced decentralization of information but also because of the increasing globalization of business operations. The introduction of computers and the ability of (mostly) each employee to communicate with external forced companies to specifically define, manifest and distribute communication policies to all employees. However, trends in business practice to more and more tailor products/services and companies processes to local markets let new/alternative communication/design policies emerge for each region.
It is interesting to observe, that companies nowadays have hundreds sometimes thousands of websites for different regions, events and purposes. This is an interesting observation from a i202 perspective: How do you ensure consistency in documents? How can you keep an overview of everything?

Marketers seem to have recognized these challenges and heavily invest in cloud based marketing platforms that allow a company to develop, organize, execute and analyze marketing campaigns / marketing communications on a global scale. This is a platform which integrates external marketing agencies and intern departments to have a better overview and control over existing communication channels. Major vendors are the classic Business Process Outsourcing companies in India such as Infosys or Wipro.