Facebook CIO: Social media is at the core in shift of IT culture

Industries are transforming by organizing around people - particularly IT management, according to Facebook's chief information officer Tim Campos.

Speaking at the NASA IT Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday morning, Campos outlined where he sees social media affecting information technology in the next decade.

Pinpointing the 1990s as a time when the Internet was more focused on browsing and finding information divided by categories in directories (i.e. Yahoo) and the 2000s as a decade dedicated to search, Campos argued that the next 10 years will be about discovery.

While that sounds a bit lofty at first, there are some concrete arguments to back that up. Campos said that "social is more efficient for finding information relevant to us," which will 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.

Part of the reason social is starting to impact IT so strongly, Campos said, is that the IT environments at many Silicon Valley companies getting off the ground today are very different. They're focused more on customization and choice rather than standardization and cost efficiency.

Again, some of the ideas here sound a bit ungrounded and come off rather careless. After all, plenty of companies do (and should) care about cost efficiency, which Campos did acknowledge at one point, but it seems all to easy for an exec at a company worth billions of dollars to dismiss cost efficiency so easily.

Furthermore, Campos posited that "choice is actually incredibly empowering" for employees, citing that Facebook lets employees choose between using a Mac or PC, BlackBerry or iPhone, etc. and that there are even vending machines with office supplies at the Facebook campus so that employees can grab USB drives and other accessories when needed. Although 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. That comes across as naive, but considering how well Facebook is doing (and Google and other major companies with such perks), they must be doing something right.

Additionally, cloud computing, which Campos dubbed as "the most transformative change to IT that has occurred within the last 10 to 15 years," is also encouraging the shift in IT culture as companies emerging today don't have a legacy. 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 come into play more reasonably here 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.

Finally, Campos listed innovation as 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."

These are the things we tell our employees. It is empowering and allows them to think creatively. If they were operating in an environment where they thought they must execute perfectly and flawlessly, they would follow the tried-and-true approach. That is what everyone is already doing.

Campos concluded that social media is all about connections, and that can be applied to the enterprise as well. Citing Facebook as an example, Campos said that social media -- especially video, whether it be for desktop video conferencing, telepresence and other similar functions -- facilitates collaboration as the social network's virtual workforce expands globally.

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