Thursday, October 23, 1997

Web site departments emerging at companies

By Diana Kunde

The Dallas Morning News

As the trendy multibillion-dollar Internet industry continues to grow, there's a less noticed employment boomlet going on.

Sure, Internet-related firms continue to hire Webmeisters to serve business clients. But now companies from airlines to banks to booksellers are forming internal online departments to design, maintain and plan the use of their Web sites, a relatively new business outlet. Career opportunities are being created for adventuresome folks within their own firms.

"There's enormous satisfaction being in a business where there are no ground rules. You get to figure it out as you go along," said Dudley Nigg, executive vice president in charge of online services for Wells Fargo Bank.

The new staffs vary greatly in size, from Wells Fargo's more than 300 online banking employees to small, cross-functional teams that design simple Web sites at some firms.

But the trend is upward, said Paul Cavejian of Buck Consultants in Stamford, Conn., who recently surveyed 104 large industrial, retail and service companies about their Internet-related jobs.

"Companies are saying, 'We're not going to farm this out anymore. We going to have this department in-house.' ... And what they're doing is paring off people from their systems department and their marketing departments," Cavejian said.

The average size of the Internet staff at the companies surveyed was 14. Average salaries ranged from about $110,000 for vice president of online services to about $45,000 for a Web artist.

Because most corporations have only recently embraced the Internet, the field is wide open for those with a technical bent and a yen for change.

Wells Fargo's online banking staff of marketing, systems and customer service employees is "a very diverse group, but most came from elsewhere in the bank and sort of gravitated to this brave new world," Nigg said.

The San Francisco-based company moved fairly early into online banking with a proprietary software product in 1989. But when Wells Fargo offered its banking services on the Internet in May 1995, he said, business "suddenly took off."

The firm trained its own Internet experts, partly because there weren't many specialists available. The strategy is paying off, Nigg said.

"This isn't R&D anymore. It's a full-blown business," he said.

Wells Fargo's online banking, with 330,000 customers, is now breaking even. The bank expects to have 2 million customers checking their balances and paying bills via the Internet by 2000 with little additional cost.

At American Airlines, John Samuel said he pushed for the chance to head an operation that would deliver ticketing and other customer services online.

In 1995, he'd been in charge of a group looking at ways to enhance revenue. "We put a presentation together. ... We said we needed to participate (in developing Internet services), and it wasn't going to be something you could just do on the side," Samuel said.

"I actually lobbied to do it."

As director of distribution planning, Samuel now leads a staff of 18 in charge of American's Web site and dial-in software products. Customers can check fares, view their AAdvantage reward program balances and buy tickets on the Internet.

He, too, has filled most jobs internally.

"For the most part, we've hired folks with technical backgrounds. But there aren't many people who have more Internet experience than they can express in months," Samuel said. "The first thing we've looked for is a real natural curiosity about this subject."

Scott Nason, American vice president and chief information officer, has responsibility for the airline's internal, or intranet, Web sites with input from the company's separate units.

"Many of our own departments have created their Web sites themselves," he said.

Even in smaller doses, Internet experience can be valuable. Consider Sherry Koven, 26, marketing project leader at CellStar Corp., who coordinates a three-person team from systems, marketing and graphics to maintain CellStar's Web site.

Koven designed and built a site for her previous employer, experience that helped her land the position at CellStar.

She learned on the job when her former employer asked her to investigate launching a Web site.

"I asked them to give me two weeks to do research. By then, I could answer them with how long it would take me or whether we should farm the work out," she said.

Koven decided she could do it on her own, using specialized software.

"I was excited about the prospect of trying something new and different," she said.

People who move to the expanding online field share a certain camaraderie, Nigg of Wells Fargo said. "We're all zealots, of course. We think we're changing the way the world works. It's pretty exciting to be part of that."