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By Sue Kelly
Addressing a crowd at the NASA IT Summit in San Francisco recently, Facebook CIO Tim Campos described how he sees social media changing information technology in the next decade. In a nutshell, the IT industry and the Internet at large are both on the start of a major shift as social media becomes more and more important, according to Facebook’s CIO.
Whole industries are in the process of being transformed as social media permits them to organize around people into groups. In particular IT management and the integration of web based social services. Facebook’s Tim Campos offered no begining or ending point to this transformation, just that it is already underway and will continue as the pace of innovation continues to accelerate.
In a historical reflection, Campos depicted the 1990s as a time when the Internet was more focused on browsing and finding information divided by categories in directories ( such as Yahoo) and the 2000s as a decade dedicated to search. He suggested that the next decade will be about information discovery mostly through computer assisted communities.
Campos said that “social is more efficient for finding information relevant to us. This whwill have an impact on a number of different industries.” Campos offered gaming as prime example, citing Microsoft’s Xbox and Facebook’s favorite social gaming company, Zynga as two of the leaders in this space. Whole groups of like minded individuals are brought together in this case into a competitive environment to collaborate.
One of the reasons social media is starting to impact IT so strongly, Campos said, is that the IT environments at many Silicon Valley companies getting starting today are different then they were in the past. They have become more focused on customization options and choice rather than standardization and cost efficiency. Start up companies have the choice of many low cost open source frameworks from which to choose and to define and differentiate themselves with little initial capital.
Campos continued to make his point when stating that “choice is actually incredibly empowering for employees." He was referring to the fact that Facebook lets employees choose between using a Mac or PC, BlackBerry or iPhone. In addition, there are even vending machines with office supplies at the Facebook campus so that employees can easily access USB drives and other devices conveniently. While employees aren’t charged personally, they can see the cost to the company. Campos said here that when employees feel more empowered and free to make their own decisions, they’ll make the right ones most of the times at least. There will always be someone in the crowd that will take advantage.
According to Campos cloud computing is the most transformative change to IT that has occurred within the last 10 to 15 years. It is also facilitating the shift in IT culture as companies emerging today don’t have legacy systems to contend with. Campos said that at least 70 percent of Facebook’s internal information services exist in the cloud, and that anything else left on the premises is for strategic purposes or just last bastions of technology that haven’t been moved to the cloud yet.
Choice and customization are important efficiencies of cloud computing as IT departments can be more agile while still maintaining a smaller staff, and they can choose what is available on the market and scalable to their needs.
Lastly, Campos said innovation is the final pillar of sorts in the evolution of IT at the moment. The key here, Campos said, is that “failure is the critical ingredient to creating an innovative culture.”
Campos concluded that social media is all about connections, and that can be applied to the enterprise as well. Using Facebook as an example, Campos said that social media — especially video, whether it be for desktop video conferencing, telepresence or other, they facilitate collaboration as the social network’s virtual workforce continues to expand globally.
Cross-posted from myITview.com
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