The Role of IT in the Enterprise by Google CIO Ben Fried

I read an interview of Google’s CIO Ben Fried. He has a very interesting view of IT in an organization. Essentially, it came down to 2 things:

Do something different – Quit doing the same old thing. Nobody cares that their email works or that their internet connection is fast or that accounting batch finished 30 seconds sooner than it did yesterday. Find something unique that is going to help users do their job more efficiently and give your organization a strategic advantage and go with it.
Give users what they want – Employees work more efficiently when they use the technology that they are comfortable with. It doesn’t matter if 50% of the company uses Windows, 20% use Mac and 30% use Linux. If they are more efficient then IT is doing their job.