A new Head of Communications

Well after many months it seems we have a new Head of Communications on the way. Congratulations to Antony Robbins (LinkedIn profile), who will be our boss starting from July. This is, I suppose, when we'll start to find out what it really means for the digital media "team" to be split off from the rest of IT and integrated into a department with Press and Marketing. There are obvious synergies there, but there are with IT too (and several other departments) so I hope we can develop a healthy and balanced perspective on what the digital museum is all about.


Hopefully before that point we will have started or even completed the process of finding a replacement for Mia, who we lost to the Science Museum all those months ago. The vacant post is being boosted to "Digital Museum Manager", to make up for the fact that we have no manager responsible for web and digital media since October, for reasons it would be imprudent to expand upon here. We need someone at that level to take on the planning, policy and strategic work that the HoC will be too busy to deal with, given that he's covering the whole of communications (internal and external), but we also have to have a developer to fill the gap that Mia left so this will be a pretty hands-on post, with probably more time coding than managing. We'll have to see if this proves sufficient, since even when we were fully staffed we were short-staffed.

Looking at Mr Robbin's profile it is good to see that internal communications are part of his skill-set. I think it's broadly felt at all levels here that MOL needs to work on this area in order to strengthen us as a corpus of colleagues with a commonly understood direction, and it will be interesting to see how our internal comms evolve in the coming months. Between now and July there's a lot that needs doing, so we'll have to muddle on in the meantime, but overall an interesting time ahead.