Its great and all that the civil service is beginning to take online seriously, and I welcome the fact that in the near future there will be a director of digital engagement roaming the corridors of power.
But look at what’s happening in the US. This is clearly a serious attempt to embed digital media / communication / outreach across government organisations by bringing in serious players into senior roles. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Contrasting this with the UK role, I think that’s what I meant when I said that there aren’t more strategic web roles in UK government.
I’m not familiar with the terminology, so am not exactly clear what ‘agency’ means in American administrations (I presume its an equivalent to our departments) nor quite how senior a director role is – but I presume its pretty high up the tree judging by the job description.
Whitehall Webby 
Oddly I read the job ad quite differently – as a way that the US is catching up with the UK.
Apparently (according to Radio 5’s Pods program) the US government has had no web editors until now. Not one. That’s because job titles and descriptions have to be set at a federal (national) level – an agency can’t just write a new job description and advertise it. No one at federal level had ever got around to it and so, technically, the US government had no such roles. This announcement seems to me to be a long overdue correction and the creation of such a job role.
But I didn’t see it as strategic, and it seems to me to be something between a hands-on ‘web editor’ and the Head of e-Comms role you used to do. I wouldn’t be fooled by ‘Director’ – these days, job title inflation is such that “Director of Hospitality” can be the cafeteria till operator! But to give it due credit, this job announcement is a key step forward in professionalising the US digital media workers.
(Agencies aren’t the same as our departments, BTW, but are analogous to – well, our agencies like the Environment Agency, Met Office, Ofcom, etc. US Federal agencies range from the Office of Government Ethics through the Federal Communications Commission and the infamous FEMA, right up to the FBI, CIA and NASA.)
Yeah, I must admit, I didn’t see it as much more than a standard Head of eComms job description.
Director is not so high on the rung in Australian government either – it’s a senior middle-management band.
When we start seeing web roles with ‘Secretary’ in them somewhere, it will indicate a senior position (at least here).