Keep It Interesting

Google doesn't disclose how much it spends on IT. Susquehanna Financial Group estimates Google invested about $300 million in IT in the first half of this year, or about 30% of the company's overall capital expenditures during that period, according to analyst Marianne Wolk. For the past few years, she says, Google was spending roughly 50% of capital expenditures on IT, but that percentage has diminished as the company increases spending in other areas, including land, as it expands.

Google's unorthodox approach to managing its Ph.D.s drove its decision not to budget research and development separately, as most tech companies do. "You end up in many companies with this divide between research and engineering," explains Alan Eustace, senior VP of engineering and research. By dividing those budgets, he says, "you're pretty much guaranteeing institutionally that you won't be solving interesting problems."

IT management at Google is decentralized. The company has neither a CIO nor CTO, but it's brimming with senior-level engineers and other technologists. They include Bill Coughran, VP of engineering for systems infrastructure, who oversees the distributing computing programs that power Google's online applications, and Eustace, who's responsible for product R&D. Sergey Brin isn't just Google's co-founder--his day-to-day job is president of technology. Merrill, brought in as senior director of IS three years ago, now is responsible for internal engineering and worldwide support.

Google employs a matrix management system where managers have many direct reports, and engineers report to multiple people. Engineers get most of their direction and critiques from the project leaders with whom they work. Since engineers can change projects every three months, Google eschews traditional approaches to project management and performance appraisals. Like other things at Google, artificial intelligence and computer automation perform some of the grunt work. "Our goal is to automate as many things as we can because it makes unfun things not happen," Merrill says. "Nobody wants to have a boring job, right?"

A tracking system automatically pulls information on job applicants, gives a hiring manager a job candidate's resumé, offers questions to ask, and sends the manager an e-mail after the interview asking what he or she thought of the candidate. Job interviews can involve logic questions, writing code, talking about software architecture, and generally proving to Google's brain trust that the applicant is a fast learner, since the company doesn't keep people working on the same problems for very long.

Lots of small, short-lived projects mean traditional project management software based on task lists isn't right for Google. For one thing, techies aren't very good at cataloging how they spend their hours. What they are good at, it turns out, is writing up a few short sentences or snippets about what they do each day. Those get compiled in a database along with periodic updates from project leaders about a team's deliverables. The project system tags the input by topic and routes to the appropriate people. "This is not hard AI," Merrill says. Still, who else manages workers like this?

Performance reviews are handled in a similarly technocratic way. Google's "Perf" system lets managers write e-mails--again read by a computer before any human--describing what a worker did on a project that was good or bad. Come review time, peers get an e-mail asking to compare the employee to other Google people. Perf breaks up the answers, measures who's being compared with whom, and--get this--makes the answers public. The way Merrill figures it, techies like open-air back patting. Presumably, the process airs some dirty laundry, too, but Merrill says that would happen anyway. "We have to protect our culture as we're growing fast," he says. "That's what keeps us up nights."

Google's approach isn't without its detractors. One marketing person who came to Google in 2004 as part of an acquisition grew frustrated by lack of resources and support, and quit. "I think Google is a great place to be from an IT engineer standpoint," the former employee says. "I don't know that it's quite as good as people think from the business and marketing side."

The company has a ways to go before its marketing savvy matches its engineering. Apart from its search engine and advertising system, Google's wide variety of online applications have seen only modest adoption (see story, "In Depth: Google Aims At Microsoft Office's Weak Spot With Desktop Suite"). Its Gmail service has yet to seriously challenge long-established free e-mail services from Yahoo and Microsoft. The same is true for its online financial portal, Google Finance. And Google Maps remains a distant third to MapQuest and Yahoo Maps.

Culture Of Choice

Google employees use Linux, Mac OS, and Windows on desktop computers, depending on their needs and desires. Many use homegrown programs such as Google Desktop, Google Earth, the acquired Writely word processor, and the recently launched Google Spreadsheets. In general, if an employee wants certain software, he or she can request it through the company intranet without jumping through a lot of hoops for approval.

Merrill is evasive when asked what kinds of commercial PC software are used at Google. "More important than what we put on each desktop is how we think about what to put on each desktop," he says obliquely. "Goo-gle's philosophy is that choice is always better than control. Tightly centralized control gets in the way of innovation."

He then takes a jab at CIOs--which he describes as a title used by "old-world companies"--at other companies. "Most people in my job try to control. 'Here are the three things you can buy.'" Merrill explains. "I try to control as a little as I possibly can but make it easy to work within parameters that I know how to work with."

Merrill sees a distinction between tools that tell you something and tools that stop you from doing something. For example, he observes that some financial services institutions block instant messaging because of they way they interpret regulations. "We don't think that's the right approach here," he says.

The right approach, as Merrill sees it: Talk a lot; use data, not intuition; automate wherever you can.