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The Organization of Communications 151

be devolved to them. But the central communications department, whose director by
now had become a member of the executive team, was kept in place and still
heads the communications council that works across the three companies and
deals with strategic issues around AT&T’s positioning as ‘the world’s networking
company’.
As the restructuring in AT&T’s recent history shows, the organization of communi-
cations may equally be changed, adapted and restructured over time. With each
change and at any point in time, however, senior managers and communication
practitioners need to reflect and evaluate whether the organizational structure for
communications is still effective and lean in the light of the communications
resources (i.e. disciplines and professionals) that the company possesses. Three key
steps are essential in such an evaluation exercise.
1. Identify and characterize the present and anticipated communications resource.
The first step in considering and evaluating the structuring of communications is
to identify what communications disciplines there actually are in the company,
and whether any new disciplines and expertise (e.g. social responsibility report-
ing) are expected in the near future. Once all of these disciplines are identified,
managers should further characterize them. Do these disciplines serve to
communicate to stakeholders about the company as a whole, about its products,
or both? And which of these disciplines provide advice and general counsel
alongside more operational tactics and techniques? And how many people are
working in each of these disciplines? Once the range and scope of all commu-
nications disciplines have been identified, managers can start to consider and
reflect how these disciplines might be best organized.
2. Arrange disciplines into departments in an efficient and effective manner.
Managers need to ask themselves whether the current way in which disciplines
are taken together into departments reflects the interdependencies between
these disciplines in terms of resource dependencies (whether disciplines are
highly dependent on one another for knowledge, skills or materials) or domain
similarities (whether disciplines share objectives, stakeholder groups, tactics and
skills), and whether the departmental arrangement is thus effective. If this is not
the case, the company may not capitalize fully on its communications resources,
as these are not shared, and therefore may not fully tap its communications
expertise. Managers also need to ponder whether the departmental arrange-
ment is efficient in that it reflects clear economies of scale. If, for instance, too
many independent units have been created without any valid reasons, this
proves costly and inefficient. The trade-off with the departmental arrangement
is thus to create the minimum required number of departments, which also
secures effectiveness in that disciplines with interdependencies are pooled.
3. Determine the need for coordination across departments. The final step, once
disciplines have been put into departments, is to identify the amount and the
nature of interaction between departments, and how this interaction can best
be facilitated and coordinated. When there is a steady flow of interaction
between certain departments, say between a marketing department in a
business unit and a staff communications department at group headquarters, there
is a need for a horizontal coordination mechanism, such as a work team or
communications guidelines. The type of horizontal structure to use depends not
only on the amount of interaction, but also on the nature of this interaction;