Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ, March 18, 2008, Business Technology page) published an interesting article, “Pleasing Google’s Tech-Savvy Staff.” WSJ interviewed Google’s impressive CIO Douglas Merrill on “How do you run the IT department at a company whose employees are considered among the world’s most tech-savvy?”
I liked the piece for a couple of reasons. First, I find that anything Google does is at the very least interesting, often highly innovative, and sometimes, for me personally, extremely useful and generally well-implemented. Yes, I know there are exceptions, and that’s ok – that’s the price of being an innovator.
Second, the article gave an interesting glimpse into IT circa 2017 for traditional companies and the role of IT. By traditional companies in this context, I mean those whose business is not IT. In response to a question by Vaughini Vara (I get her name is misspelled even more than mine!) about the structure of Google’s IT organization, Douglas said, “We are a decentralized technology organization, in that almost everyone at Google is some type of technologist.” Think about your company 9 years from now – to what degree will everyone be some type of technologist? To what degree should they be? As you ponder these questions, don’t forget the demographics – many of your boomers will be spending time on the proverbial golf course, and an important part of your worforce will be the netgen – who grew with technology, instant messaging, social networking, online gaming, and so on.
Third, I liked the article because at its heart it addressed the topic for one of my company’s new multi-company research projects, “Redefining Employee Computing.” This is about the emerging trend of moving away from a highly controlled and locked-down approach to what used to be known as “end-user computing” to a more open and self-service model – another important dimension of Business-IT Maturity and of IT circa 2017.
Finally, I’m a fan of Douglas Merrill ever since seeing his (very long – be warned, but fascinating) YouTube video on innovation at Google:
Filed under: IT Management, IT Maturity | Tagged: Douglas Merrill, Google, innovation, Redefining Employee Computing
