Communicating the Iraq conflict - do you have a duty to provide information for staff?

One of the main differences between the current conflict in Iraq and the previous one is access to online news information. During the last conflict, few people had internet access and "corporate intranets" was a term that had yet to be invented. InfoTech Communication's Steve Nichols (www.infotechcomms.co.uk) asks whether, in this conflict, companies have a duty to use their intranets keep staff informed of developments.

There was no way that news from the last Gulf War could be carried in company newspapers. The lead times made that all but impossible.

But this time around corporate communicators have a dilemma. Should they provide regular news items about activities in Iraq or is that outside their remit?

The growth of corporate intranets means that communicators now have a very fast news medium to hand. External internet links for staff have also made it easier for them to access news sites like the BBC, Reuters and CNN.

But not all staff have internet access and even if they did, what would be the effect of 10,000 staff all trying to hit the BBC's news web site at the same time? Corporate web servers can and will crash, networks can overload and the effect on real business can be disastrous.

Some companies saw this effect during the events of September 11. More than one corporate network was brought down in the UK as staff clamoured for information - leaving companies with no way of conducting their legitimate business.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, preliminary data suggests that between 13 and 20 March 2003 (the first full week of the war in Iraq), the numbers of users accessing news sites rose by around 40 per cent.

The BBC reports that Keynote Systems, which regularly tests the response times of busy websites, said the responsiveness of its News Online suffered during the busy lunchtime period in mid-March with average download times rising from 0.47 seconds to 1.88 seconds.

ITV News went through a more serious slowdown with average download times increasing from 5.66 seconds to 15.84 seconds.

As the conflict got under way, some sites such as that run by Arabic satellite TV broadcaster Al Jazeera were only intermittently available.

But how important is it for staff to be up to date with activities in the Gulf? As a matter of national interest you could argue that companies have a right to provide them with information about the conflict. As an internal PR exercise it could be seen as a worthwhile activity.

And if updates posted on a corporate intranet both fulfil that role and prevent business-critical internet systems from collapsing it could be seen as the right thing to do.

A regular update of important news delivered to the employees' desktops could, in the long term, save time and therefore money.