Q&A

IT's Third Epoch...and Running IT at Google

If there's anyone who understands the impact of consumer technology on the enterprise, it's Google CIO Douglas Merrill. He believes we're not only entering a new business epoch; it's one in which IT leaders with real technical skills will be more in demand than ever.

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Then we applied that thinking to security threats and we said the best way to manage security is to have everything look the same—and hey, look, it also has this other side effect: It tends to have lower costs; you get this really nice cycle yielding perfect uniformity.

But if you look at natural organisms, few develop naturally to complete uniformity. Very few birds look the same. The consumerization trend exposes the organization to additional diversity—diversity of the end point.

We've changed the way we think about IT here. We don't have to drive for uniformity. Our systems, which basically are consumer systems, have to run on the end points. The side effect of that is I can let a particular employee work on a Mac because it makes him 10 percent more productive. That productivity advantage outweighs the minor cost advantage I get from uniformity.

Google information systems believes in choice, not control. The goal of choice is to let your talent express their talent in the most effective way they can.

Many years of team dynamics studies show that diverse teams tend to do more complete searches of the problem space and yield better, more creative answers. It seems strange to recognize that you need diversity of talent to solve these problems, then try to force that diversity into a funnel of uniformity.

CIO: What impact are consumer applications having on the enterprise?

Merrill: The most interesting developments in IT are being done in consumer applications, not business applications. The best engineers are going there. And consumer requirements are so high now in terms of stability, quality and reliability, that consumer applications are just as good as most business applications. In fact, sometimes better. Google's uptime is many, many, many nines, and we're a consumer application. Most of the manufacturing and trading applications I've been associated with in my career have a lower uptime than Google.com. So something has changed. This idea that consumer requirements are the equal of business requirements changes the way that we CIOs consume and build software for the future. The benefit (if I can figure out a way to use it) is that there's lots of great consumer software lying around. All the reasons I couldn't use it before no longer apply.

So what's the problem?

Merrill: The consumerization of IT changes the way people like me do our jobs in many ways. Suddenly, all the rules have changed. Software developers don't exactly know who to listen to; CIOs don't exactly know who to buy from, and VCs and board members don't exactly understand how to value the companies we're getting involved with. Everything's in flux. If your job is to limit risk, that's a horrible world to live in because it's all risky. Of course, there's risk in a good sense, because without risk there can be no return. The problem is, I don't know how to model it. We understand the monetization models used by enterprise software; we don't yet understand the models for this.