The age-old debate about the chicken and the egg perhaps best defines a very contemporary dilemma during meetings between corporate communicators, employee engagement specialists and IT experts when discussing their company’s new website or intranet platform.

Your tech colleagues will probably insist that priority should be given to a mobile-friendly design even if that meant sacrificing certain aspects of functionality. Their rationale is sound; the world is moving to an increasingly mobile future ... if it’s not there already.

And future-proofing would help the company tick many boxes including that of long-term cost saving by ensuring that the website or intranet remains compatible with user experience trends for many years ahead.

HR is likely to take a much more pragmatic approach, especially when the intranet is concerned. The objective in that case should be that we live in the present and the needs of employees cannot be compromised on account of future trends. Therefore, we should design an Intranet which provides unfettered functionality to the majority of employees and helps them get the best out of this platform ... today.

This could be helping an employee find a telephone number of the person on the 15th floor to unearthing information about getting involved in the company’s CSR initiatives and everything in between.

The obvious disconnect here can be found in the disparate mandate of each of these two corporate functions. The focus of the IT team falls on the user experience during the development phase and the technological platform upon which the intranet or website will move in the authoring and go-live stages.

They have a budget to work with. Rightfully so, because this is what they get paid to do.

On the other hand, the focus for HR is to ensure the intranet and the website serves the diverse needs of many critical stakeholders within the organisation, ranging from talent acquisition and recruitment to company’s policyholders, employee services, etc. The list can go on and on. Rightfully so again.

What should then be the role of corporate communications and what should it endeavour to do in order to bridge the two approaches? It appears as mission impossible because it really needs to find a solution to that age-old question — which came first, the egg before the chicken, or the chicken before the egg?

In an eggshell, pun intended, corporate communications’ priority should always favour a solution that promotes and protects the reputation of the company to both its internal audience — the employees themselves — and its diverse external stakeholders, irrespective of functionality or design preferences.

But even more crucially, the focus of the corporate comms team should fall on communication itself in ensuring that all parties get a crystal clear understanding of each other’s challenges and limitations and the ecosystem within which they must operate in a timely and transparent fashion.

Once complete alignment between the corporate functions responsible for the development of these two information conduits has been reached should the design and development process begin. And this is another area where corporate communications needs to lead with the creation of a detailed brief that incorporates the toned-down, realistic and pragmatic version of each stakeholder’s desires.

Once this brief has been signed off, the agency needs to be called in to receive it and the role of corporate communications here is also crucial in the way it manages to convey the brief to the design and technical teams from the chosen vendor.

Different people, different views, different interests and priorities, different mandates need to come together for a common goal. Perhaps then, instead of trying to answer the age-old question and get it horribly wrong, all corporate communications needs to do is make birds of a feather flock together.

The writer is Head of PR and Social Media at Al-Futtaim and author of “Back to the Future of Marketing — PRovolve or Perish”. Follow him on Twitter @georgekotsolios