A really effectively introduced final session now underway here at PDF 2007, with former rivals Zack Exley (Kerry ’04) and Mike Turk (Bush ’04) talking about the bureaucracy that challenges the Internet operation in a campaign … and how the phenomenon tracked pretty closely to the emergence and integration of an IT function in any corporate structure.
“And it’s not just the net” that struggled due to integration issues, Joe Trippi’s pointing out, “they have problems decentralizing anyway. … But there’s more integration of the web teams this year with the rest of the campaigns. Light years ahead of 2004.”
You get all sorts of cripes-I’m-not-the-only-one chills leaving the grit and the grind of your day job as Internet Director at a large organization for a day, and getting to hear these folks all talk about the challenges of “integration.” Not a word that made its way in to public discourse about the Internet and politics until recently. (Though a word growled, yearned and bemoaned over tasty beverages for years among me and colleagues from all sorts of groups and campaigns.)
“You’ve all used the word ‘integrated,'” Mike Turk is pointing out as I type this, adding how it resonates with the realities of his Bush/Cheney ’04 campaign experience. “I discovered fairly quickly,” he’s reminiscing, “that there were conversations and decisions among the senior staff that were brought to the Internet team already decided.”
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Josh Orton from BarackObama.com is saying “Working on an Internet team, you have to know a lot about what the other departments do” if you want to work together effectively.