After a break that has coincided with some major transitions--new job and new country to start with--the call of internal communication blogging beckons once again.

I haven't emerged from my break with a lot of new answers, but with a few questions and observations:

Questions:

1). Can we measure what the impact of absent internal communication happens to be?

This question, while not far from the surface, stems from a former client's elimination of its internal comms function. Aside from a bit of personal sting--I did some of my best work for this client, committed myself to its cause, and helped train one of the people sent to this company's hereafter--it strikes me that not only haven't we definitively demonstrated a return on investment for internal comms, we certainly haven't demonstrated the financial harm done by its absence.  This is biting us in the proverbial tail.

2) Are communicators faring better in this recession then last?

One measure of the effectiveness of the industry's efforts to demonstrate its value is the resilience of practitioner employment and hiring.  From where I sit in Europe, things seem to remain fairly robust, but perhaps those who are hiring are tending to seek more tactical skill sets and to work to more specified briefs.

3) What will be the big trend for the next year?

It's unclear, but one trend I am hoping to see given more airtime is my personal favorite--the tension between centralisation and decentralisation in organisations.  I find this issue intrinsically interesting--and it also is the canvas where such crucial issues as the value and leveragibilty of lateral and networked communication unfolds and where the democratic dimension of organisational communication plays out. While much traditional business thinking focuses on infrastructure and vertical power, the increase in understanding of the impact of ideology and dispersed power--aided by the free or cheap infrastructure provided by the Internet--may spawn some new thinking and models that could redefine the communications playing field.