Pattern Finder

Interview with Google CIO: He Gets It

There's an interesting article on CIO Insight entitled, "Google It: IT's Competitive Advantage." In it, reporter Brian Watson interviews Google CIO Ben Fried (formerly an infrastructure architect at Morgan Stanley) on his view of how IT should be run.

When viewed as an IT vendor, Google continues to make product strategy mistakes. But its internal IT strategy is spot on. Here are some quotes from the article followed by my comments.

At Morgan Stanley, we were very early customers of the Google search appliance. A lot of the young people there had their first exposure to productivity applications via Google Apps. That’s what they wanted. We gave them something else, which was more expensive and not what they wanted to deal with. It made me think: How do you deal with this, because there’s only so long you can give them the tools they don’t want and expect to get out of them everything they’re capable of.

He's right. The bottleneck is now no longer technology, but rather people. If you don't give tools to workers that they enjoy and can leverage, you're hampering their creativity and productivity. Ben goes on to say,

It’s hard for CIOs to accept that people feel strongly, passionately and personally about the technology tools they use to work. It’s almost insulting to people when they hear, “We know better than you how it’s best for you to work.” It’s tough for people who came from a generation where they weren’t empowered and technically capable of making choices.

This is definitely a generation thing. When I started in business, you were thrilled just to have access to a computer. If it was difficult to use, that was the way it was: you adjusted to the machine. These days, with machines a dime a dozen, the machine needs to adjust to you.

A common approach to driving costs out of customer support is rigid standardization—the thinking there is, we’re choosing only one tool for each job and, in so doing, we’ll make the support very easy and low cost. People have all kinds of great metrics for measuring this. But those CIOs end up getting painted into a corner. They take a standardization approach, which is ”all or nothing” for the organization and do things all one way; it may be a Socratic extreme, but it describes the philosophy by saying, “By not doing, we’ll knock costs out of the system.”

When talking to clients, I see this "we're going to standardize on one thing" strategy all the time. This made sense when the technology was expensive and complicated; however, now that people are much more tech savvy, some apps are web-based, and many apps don't break--demanding standardization to make IT's life easier is usually wrong. This is why a number of clients I talk to are looking to use more than one productivity suite. Microsoft Office will continue to have a place for power users; but many employees don't need--or get overwhelmed--by that much (relatively expensive) functionality. In this case, if a company says, "There will be two supported productivity suites: Microsoft Office and Openoffice.org"--while the support complexity will go up slightly, the licensing costs will decrease significantly. Ben goes on to say, 

We try to give people some measure of choice that we can support and build an ecosystem around. We support Macintosh and two versions of Windows and Linux on the desktop. We obviously like and prefer when people use Google Apps, but we also have Microsoft Office, OpenOffice and iWork in the environment. So there’s a lot of choice, and we’ve made an investment to do this.

Read the entire interview. Ben Fried gets it.

Using Twitter to Do "Real" Work

Image via CrunchBase

While the media continues to talk about Twitter as a social phenomenon, I'm struck with how people are starting to use it as a replacement for longtime standbys. For example:

• Product Support: Back in June, I talked to an IT manager at a small financial services firm in the UK. They'd moved to Google Apps and were quite happy with it. As he noted, "It's refreshing to have relatively happy users." When I asked him about support, he said, "Nothing has been broken. When you're looking for information it's easy to find; if you're unsure, one Tweet will get you the info." It's been my experience that enterprises are less than thrilled with Google Apps support--it's difficult to get Google on the phone and you spend a lot of time trolling through forums. This IT manager didn't seem to have that problem, I suspect because he had a relatively small installation (eight employees). However, he also was completely sidestepping the normal support procedure. He'd moved beyond dealing with the vendor; he was quizzing the users via Twitter.
• Product Intelligence: SharePoint 2010 is currently in beta test, and enterprises are pounding it and poking it to understand it. If you go to Microsoft and ask how the beta is going, they'll give you the party line that things are going well (which I think is accurate, as far as it goes). However, that's the 50,000 foot view. What you really want to know is, "What are people doing with it, what are they trying out, where are they running into trouble?" With Twitter, that's easy to find out. Just do a search for "#SP2010." (On Google, do a search for "#sp2010  site:twitter.com"; on TweetDeck, add a column and search for "#sp2010". That tag gives you a realtime pulse on what's happening with SharePoint 2010.

A Reminder of How Bad Things Can Be in IT--And How They're Improving

Image via Wikipedia

On Tuesday, Martha Coakley, the current Massachusetts Attorney General and a college classmate of mine (Williams '75), won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. (For you trivia buffs, here's what she looked like--and I looked like--freshman year in college.) Given Massachusetts' strong Democratic leanings, she'll probably win the election in January, taking Ted Kennedy's place.

Her win reminded me of one of the most depressing conversations about IT I've ever had. I don't see Martha that often--maybe once every couple of years--but back around 2002 she called me up to give her advice on what to do about her IT department. At the time, Martha was Middlesex County DA, and she was trying to figure out what her options were for improving IT support for her office. She sent her car around--nice touch, I thought--and we spent an hour going over her current systems, what she was trying to do, and her budget.

While the specifics escape me now, I remember being horrified at (1) what she needed to do and (2) what she could do, given her budget. She had an IT department of one. He was doing yeoman's duty, but was seriously underpaid. It was just a disaster. I helped her with some terminology and gave her some good questions to ask--Martha would be the first to admit she's not high tech savvy--but I really couldn't help her that much. All the money was going to keep the current systems running, and there was no money left over for improving things. It was the classic case of being on a treadmill and not being able to get off.

If we had the same conversation today I think it would go a bit better. Some of the money that she had to spend for infrastructure could be re-routed to a SaaS service. Given the confidential nature of the work in a District Attorney office, I'm not sure everything could be SaaS-based, but perhaps a few things could be offloaded. Her big issue was helping her attorneys find and track information. Search technology has certainly improved, and the cost of collaboration software has gone down. For example, SharePoint is less expensive than some of the KM systems of the time.

So while we're all still struggling with how to use SaaS effectively and what IT's role should be in today's world--should it continue running the IT engine room or should it become more of a coordinator?--I think things aren't as bleak as they were back then. At the very least, there are more options. And that's a good thing.

Opening Keynote at Gilbane Conference

Following are my notes from the opening keynote at the Gilbane Conference yesterday. The panelists were: 

• Susan Parker, Director, Mass.gov, Commonwealth of Massachusetts
• Michael Edson, Director, Web and New Media Strategy, Office of the CIO, Smithsonian Institution
• Luuk de Jager, Senior Director, B2C Organizational Empowerment, Central Marketing Office Online, Philips Consumer Lifestyle

Parker: Mass.gov

Before Mass.gov, a lot of different web sites. Mass.gov came along in 2001.

Goals of Mass.gov:

• Brand: Simple, recognizable brand name
• User-Centric: Content organized according to users, not government structure
• Consistency: Same look and feel
• Consolidation: From hundreds of individual web sites to a handful of sub-portals

Mass.gov came out of an e-government task force chaired by Governor Celluci. Vision was high level. Over time has evolved into “a single face of government.”

Did an analysis of a consolidated web site; reduced the number of people needed from 20-30 to 5-6 people.

We want to deliver info to where people live, such as on Facebook. We have a long way to go to do that. We've just started on a Massachusetts Open Data initiative.

We have had a problem with being dependent on expensive consultants to keep our systems running. For products, we use Interwoven Team Site and Vignette.

Statistics:

• Mass.gov gets 2.5 million unique visitors a month; there are 200 content authors.
• 104 individual web sites in the Executive Branch before Mass.gov. In December 2009, 36 total sites.
• Before Mass.gov, 157 separate sites in all Mass government. Dec 2009 is 89; goal is 30 in June 2012.

Edson: Smithsonian

Used a process of "workshops to wiki." Time was the enemy. Used a public-facing wiki over the course of 6 weeks. To find information about the project, search for “Smithsonian Web Strategy.” Recorded the workshops on the wiki.

We’re a red ink business. We want to lose less money but involve a lot more people.

Build your APIs first; we want to have people reuse our content.

De Jager: Philips

Statistics:

• Philips has $30 billion annual revenue.
  
• 15,000 active SKUs, 52 countries

Four pillars:

• .com: The marketing site
• .shop: Used for consumer intelligence
• .live: User-generated content
• .org: Global scale, local flavor

I'll Be at the Gilbane Conference

I'll be at the Gilbane Conference in Boston this Wednesday and Thursday. I'll be on the analyst panel on the first day, entitled, "Industry Analyst Debate - What's Real, What's Hype, and What's Coming."

I always enjoy going to this conference because: (1) it's not overwhelming in size, (2) the presenters are usually quite good, and (3) I always run into people I know, both end users and other analysts.