Ben Fried, Chief Information Officer of Google

Among other topics, Ben discusses the following issues with Metis Strategy:

• The role of IT in a company as technologically savvy as Google
• Ben’s priorities around iterating on governance models, ensuring that all major internal constituents are aptly supported, enabling growth for the company, engaging the open source community, and how to share IT at Google beyond their group
• The way that Google’s “20% time” and fostering of an open source mindset has led to greater transparency and therefore greater quality of work
• Google’s approach to corporate software development standards
• The effect of the “corporatization of consumer technologies” (or the consumerization of IT) on the general IT landscape
• The prevalence of cloud computing and its ability to provide previously unrealized economies of scale, while also reducing the need for IT departments to retain commoditized services in house
• The need for IT hires to be generalists, rather than specialists, in order to be able to adapt to a perpetually evolving technology environment
• Eye on the trends: The criticality of browser security and how it should not be an afterthought for CIOs, the rise of Android and tablets in the enterprise and the need for CIOs to proactively manage, rather than react to the change, and the emergence and potential of the Chrome Operating System to solve many of the challenges brought on by personal computing

Ben Fried’s Biography

Ben Fried is the Chief Information Officer of Google. At Google, Ben oversees global technology systems for one of the premier technology companies in the world and provides technology services for all “Googlers”.

Prior to joining Google, Ben spent more than 13 years in Morgan Stanley’s technology department, where he rose to the level of Managing Director of Application Infrastructure. During his time there, he led teams responsible for software development technology, web and electronic commerce technologies and operations, and technologies for knowledge workers.

Prior to his time at Morgan Stanley, Ben helped design and develop the Decision-Theoretic Scheduler for Heuristicrats Research, under contract to NASA. It was used by NASA scientists to schedule missions for their orbital observatories.

Ben has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Columbia University.