Timothy Campos, Chief Information Officer at Facebook, helps each of the company’s 5,000-plus employees generate $1.36 million in annual revenue. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Campos offered a detailed look at how technology, corporate culture and performance come together at the company.
Efficiency and maximizing productivity, Campos explains, “is something that my staff and I live, breathe and think about, how IT can enable the efficiency and effectiveness of the company.” He believes that automation testing coupled with software tools that are tailored to the company’s unique needs has been paramount in the success of Facebook over similar, popular, companies like Google and LinkedIn.
While out-of-the-box software solutions prove to be inexpensive to purchase, it usually takes a company’s acquisition of software and implementation of the software for a company to finally realize that there is a lot of functionality that is left out that is desired, which could cost your company more money in the long run-but companies “can’t go buy the off-the-shelf solution that everyone else has and expect we’re going to have a better outcome. That doesn’t work for different objectives—and there are many—like building out our workforce.” Purpose-built, custom software that is centric on current and anticipated business objectives instead of out-of-the-box solutions can help to make your processes “better, more efficient, faster.” From the hiring process, to hardware/server maintenance, to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and internal time management, Facebook covers its most important bases and is able to provide intuitive guidance.
As CIO, Campos understands the importance of not confining productivity to “some target or cut costs to the lowest possible level.” When working with the ability to see his employees’ work ethics, he can see that they are “knowledge workers, and it is more valuable for us to make our software engineers 5% more productive than they were last year than it is for us to save a couple hundred bucks by not giving them a new laptop and making them use the same laptop for five years.”
Facebook is able to identify their most-used and most-needed processes for automation, which maximizes productivity-without confining it strictly to cost in lieu of the apparent return on investment.
