GOOG VP of Engineering has an FYI to IT Mouth Breathers
by Johnny DebacleFollowing on the report from two weeks ago, on HR vs IT, Mister Juggles uncovered some choice quotes on Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) approach to IT.
[Douglas Merrill, VP of engineering and Google’s de facto CIO] is evasive when asked what kinds of commercial PC software are used at Google. “More important than what we put on each desktop is how we think about what to put on each desktop,” he says obliquely. “Google’s philosophy is that choice is always better than control. Tightly centralized control gets in the way of innovation.”
He then takes a jab at CIOs –which he describes as a title used by “old-world companies”– at other companies. “Most people in my job try to control. ‘Here are the three things you can buy.'” Merrill explains. “I try to control as a little as I possibly can but make it easy to work within parameters that I know how to work with.”
Merrill sees a distinction between tools that tell you something and tools that stop you from doing something. For example, he observes that some financial services institutions block instant messaging because of they way they interpret regulations. “We don’t think that’s the right approach here,” he says.
The right approach, as Merrill sees it: Talk a lot; use data, not intuition; automate wherever you can.
Basically Google aligns itself to allow technology as a tool to leverage their human capital as much as possible. That is the focus. Compared to the sentiment expressed by a reader and IT professional in the comments of our previous article:
Ed
September 4th, 2006 | 5:30 am
I’m an IT guy. And no, I’m not a skinny white guy. Do what you want with your pc at home. The company dosn’t give you one for your own personal entertainment, it’s to do the job they pay you to do. Since when do you need google search to do your job? Get back to work.It’s a constant battle to keep the donkeys (otherwise known as users) from screwing up their computers. Just because you possibly haven’t screwed yours up yet is more due to luck than anything else.
The commenter sees his job in IT as being a virtual prison warden, keeping everything orderly and not letting anything get out of hand.
I think your boy from Google doesn’t know jack about the regulatory burden facing financial services companies. But, speaking as a CIO, I think the days of using IT as an instrument of control are numbered. Because we don’t have unlimited resources we can’t fulfill every user’s desires, but I expect my team to explain to users how we can get to “yes” with their software/hardware/Internet requests as opposed to saying “hell no”.
Ed would last approximately 30 seconds in my organizaztion. Unless, of course, the HR group tells me I’ve got to go through nineteen verbal warnings, written counselings, written warnings, final written warnings, and who knows what else to get rid of him…
Do IT depts spread by mitosis or is that just FUD?
Mitosis could help me reduce my project backlog…maybe I should work on that!
“the regulatory burden facing financial services companies”
Tell me more. It’s largely self-enforced standards under Sarbanes-Oxley, no? Why not just log everything, leave it at that?
Why block things like IM clients? That makes no sense to me and they definitely are valuable tools.
There’s a large number of entreprise class im clients that work with the various major networks. Hell M$ is releasing enterprise versions combining MSN and Groove.
IT is usually stocked by people who don’t understand the point of the business that they work for. They’re not there to enforce some sort of IT policy but to help the firm make money and avoid risk. Of course anyone that actually understands this is going to get the heck out of IT and start working for an application or service firm in some sort of role (dev, sales, consulting…). The only people left in IT are the useless ones. Just like HR (useful people are at Marsh or Aon).
I’m almost flattered that I got quoted…
“The commenter sees his job in IT as being a virtual prison warden, keeping everything orderly and not letting anything get out of hand.”
kind of, but not really. I fully understand that the only point of most businesses is to make money. (The exceptions being charitable organizations, gov’t agencies, etc…) The IT dept only exists to provide the tools and resources that employees need to do their jobs. Things like email, shared files, print services, enterprise applications, whatever. IT is a cost center, not a profit one and therefore has to do it’s job with limited resources. One challenge I see fairly often is that individual people, usually through ignorance and not malicious intent, will do something that affects the whole organization. Like the person who emails the 150MB movie to their friend from their work email account. No big deal, right? Except it ties up the mail server for two hours, bringing the whole companies email to a grinding halt for two hours. Who get’s the blame for that one? Or the user who stores 3GB of mp3’s on the file server. No big deal, right? Except it fills up the file server and other people can’t save their work files on the server. Who get’s the blame for that one? The whole point of enforcing restrictions is to keep things moving smoothly for everyone.
Your gripes sound a lot like complaining about cops enforcing traffic laws on the highway. Let’s list some excuses: “They are ego-maniacs on a power trip. But I’m not hurting anyone by driving 90 in a 55. I’m not an idiot, I can drive and talk on my cell phone at the same time…” The vast majority of people think that they are an above average driver. (How can 90% of the group be above average? but that’s a side topic) Imagine the chaos if the cops weren’t out there keeping us all in line. The rules exist to keep the shared resource available to everyone. The same generality applies to the IT dept.
Now for a few selected comments about some of the previous comments:
Bank CIO – the fact that you are a CIO tells me that you don’t know squat about day to day IT operations. Just because you get a report every morning doesn’t mean that you know what is happening in your organization. Stay up in your ivory tower, eat your doughnuts, and keep sending us memos – we don’t have enough to do anyway. By the way, we really appreciate your weekly thumbs up visit to our work area and the crappy pizza you buy us once a quarter.
hey – this one sounds like someone who got suckered into paying $15K for crappy IT training by the “do you want to make $65k a year” ads on the radio. Then figured out that he/she wasn’t smart enough to actually figure out what was going on. So they moved on to something really usefull like sales/consulting. Anyone else ever notice that consultants come in, suck up a lot of money, waste a lot of time, and never really get anything done?
“Why block things like IM clients?” Oh let’s see, maybe it’s the security hole they open up to each and every desktop that has a client running on it. Let’s invite a bunch of hackers into our network, they won’t hurt anything. The fact that you aren’t aware of this reinforces my belief that you are lucky to not have screwed up your pc so far. Admitedly, IM is a very usefull tool, unfortunately most of the current generation of IM clients aren’t secure.
“Your gripes sound a lot like complaining about cops enforcing traffic laws on the highway.”
Man, there is just about nothing worse than the cops enforcing traffic laws on the highway. It’s an example of how trying to do something good or harmless can be twisted into something altogether else.
Traffic copping is a revenue center for many (most?) police depts wherein they align their policing activities to generate revenue do to the twisted and perverse incentives that government creates.
Is the peace better served by a cop sitting in a “speedtrap” or walking a beat in the worst part of town? Which gets done more often?
Are citizens well served by having police become de facto judges, selectively applying justice on the highway and assigning sentences to passing cars (all of which are speeding) based on such criteria as the race of the driver, the sex(iness) of the driver and the attitude of the driver to the police?
What % of people are pulled over for speeding (relatively harmless) and what % of people are pulled over for traffic actions with larger negative externalities (casual weavers, somewhat drunk drivers, cell phone users, etc)?
Arbitrary, wasteful, misaligned with what should be their true intent — these are all things which traffic copping and information technology departments share with one another.
“Oh let’s see, maybe it’s the security hole they open up to each and every desktop that has a client running on it. Let’s invite a bunch of hackers into our network, they won’t hurt anything.”
Wow, that’s a retarded leap of logic there. I suppose installing things like Outlook are just open security holes that invite hackers in? And all http traffic too, that’s just a great big hacker e-vite.
“The fact that you aren’t aware of this reinforces my belief that you are lucky to not have screwed up your pc so far. Admitedly, IM is a very usefull tool, unfortunately most of the current generation of IM clients aren’t secure.”
Aren’t secure compared to what? I suspect if you did any kind of research, you’d find that IM applications are on par with most everything else on corporate systems when it comes to security.
Also, do a survey of companies that block IM, and I bet security isn’t their #1 reason. You’ll get productivity arguments and “well, we don’t allow TV’s either” instead.