Fireside chat with Google executives

[Music Plays] >>Presenter: We are going to finish up today
with a Fireside chat with the Googlers. So, let me have Amit come out and Michele and
Jonathan. Here they all are. There's Amit which you heard from earlier and Michele.
So, oh no, go ahead, sit down, my goodness we're catching up.
>>Amit: I like your socks.
>>Presenter: Thank you very much. [Laughter]
>>Presenter: I didn't really think that I was gonna be sitting down and showing them
off quite so much but there you go. [Laughter]
>>Presenter: So, Amit, let's start with you. You know, sometimes people think Google's
a big company, it's growing bigger every time and even federal agencies are, "Oh my God
am I going to be just lost in the" you have purple socks on for goodness sakes. Um, they
think that they'll be lost in this big corporate and what happens if they decide to, you know,
privacy stuff how do you deal with those kinds of questions as they come at you?
>>Amit: Sure. First of all, Googlers in the audience, just please raise your hand, federal
Googlers. So we have a dedicated team of, you know, 25, 30 people who are located here
and around local that just deal with those questions every day. So we have direct input
coming from clients. We have, at the same time in the backend 24 by 7 support capability
that we built out for businesses and governments that is available anytime. You just want,
you just call that number and a Google person will help you solve those problems. So we
recognize these issues that people want to understand, learn about the products and we've
built out a team. We also do a lot with, you know, these kinds of events and take them
on the road so, because this is really a transformation. Things are changing in technology and we wanna
come out and educate people about it. Most importantly it's the products. We are investing
very heavily in making the products better everyday both from the feature set perspective,
those of you, someone mentioned using hangouts, we've been using hangouts at Google now for
about a year. I mean, it's transformed how we collaborate. Bringing tech, both that,
but also things like, you know, the ISO 27001 and FISMA certification and GovCloud and things
that I know you care about. You and your constituents care about. We've been investing in all those
fronts.
>>Presenter: How much does the enterprise part of Google matter because it is a big
company?
>>Amit: Yeah. I hope it matters, I moved my family from Boston.
[Laughter] >>Amit: So I can assure you when I met Larry
and Patrick and Nagesh, I had those same questions. You know, I think, the way to think about
it is Google is at its core technology company. For consumers, we go through advertisement
for modernization opportunities for search. For enterprises, we've tried to, you know,
be a flat and fair scheme which is really low cost, at least relative to your other
options, and that is literally one of the fastest growing revenue streams inside of
Google. Just to give you a sense, advertising is a 700 billion dollar market in general.
IT is twice that size. And we use the same assets, the same technology stack with the
additional capability that I described to you when I presented. So it makes complete
logic, makes logical sense.
>>Presenter: Michele, you joined Google after a long government career and having been on
both sides now, are there perceptions that you had then that you don't have now or vice
versa?
>>Michele: I can say I've always been a big fan of Google and was one of those people
who liked to sign up for the beta testing when it came out for the general population.
And I think for me and Google, being at Google it's reaffirmed the culture that you hear
about the innovation and the very open collaboration and in my time in government I served in a
lot of roles trying to help agencies effect change. Helping people be more innovated,
stand up new capabilities and so many times you need the tools, I talk about three areas
that really can be barriers to innovation and you have culture and you have policies
and technology. And technology can be the easy part but it's the culture that's resistant
to change, that refuses to change the policy to allow the adoption of that technology and
so then they're not able to transform those business processes. So, for me, a compelling
move to Google was to try to help from the other side government transform its business
and do it across, you know, the federal government as a whole having spent most of my career
in the national security community. But I would also say too, for security, that's very
important to government and we talk about that a lot but Google has a top notch team
and you have to believe, I like to say in the Intel speak, is that sources and methods
is to an intelligence community what intellectual property is to Google. And you gotta believe
that that's a hot item to others, they would like to have that kind of IP. So, we're protecting
our intellectual property but that same security A team is protecting your private Gmail and
your enterprise suite. So that's something that's been reaffirmed to me coming to Google
is that we have a top notch team as well as great capability.
>>Presenter: I know that a lot of, the CIO for the CIA is out there talking a lot about
using the Cloud and the capabilities that it gives them and so if, what I've heard a
lot of CIOs say is that, "Well, if the CIO for the CIA thinks it's okay then it's okay
for us." That must help you. There was a question in there somewhere.
[Laughter]
>>Michele: Well, there's a few key players that you think if they make the leap others
will follow
>>Presenter: Yeah.
>>Michele: And CIA has unique requirements and NSA, of course, is who we turn to in the
government for a lot of the technical expertise on the security side. But one question I've
asked more and more to the government customers is really think, do you need classified or
do you need secure. And if you work in stability operations as I was doing right before I left
Google working on a task force supporting the secretary defense, we really needed secure
unclass, nonclass information sharing. It was actually people working at the higher
level networks and not having an ability to collaborate at the lowest common denominator
that it was impeding our ability to do more robust information sharing and collaboration
and this wasn't just with the U.S. government, it was with our common wealth, with NATO,
coalition partners, whatever the coalition of the day was and your local citizens, private
volunteers, nongovernment organizations and we lacked the kind of capabilities that you
see demonstrated here today. And I saw that a robust suite like Google apps, Google sites
and integrating the geo would make a huge difference in the success of stability operations.
Really providing that unity of effort without unity of command.
>>Presenter: One of my unknown skills is I am actually a mind reader and as you were
going through your list of three things, technology and culture and what was the third one?
[Laughs]
>>Michele: Policy.
>>Presenter: Policy, I heard a lot of folks out there going, "Yeah, check, check, check."
[Laughter] >>Presenter: But it feels like, and we talked
to Casey Coleman about this earlier, when you empower folks all of a sudden they're
actually pushing you to do more and be more innovative and it does change the culture
to a large degree. Again, there was a question in there somewhere.
>>Michele: I'll describe a model when you know, we have, we have some hardware devices
over there and a corporate culture where you had kind of the genius at the top really,
really driving people in a certain direction and being hands on and how we develop that
technology. Our co-founders and chairmen set a great corporate core values and directions
and simplicity that you have an opportunity as well within Google, there's a lot of that
bottoms up development. And in the tools that we've developed that we're now rolling out
the enterprise or tools that were developed in house to help facilitate that same collaboration
and information sharing. And, so, you see the very tools that we developed to help us
be that innovative company, that great reputation, are the same capabilities that we realize
provide value to our customer base.
>>Presenter: Jonathan, playing on that question of if you give them the tools people will
do it, you must see that a lot.
>>Jonathan: Yeah, we do. And it's funny, I'm sure you've seen it today and I kind of smile
every time I hear the word spreadsheet because I think spreadsheet for us has taken on different
meaning then it used to mean. It's much more, like I think I said earlier, it's a canvas
for information sharing that's just logical for people, it's easy for them to create things
that are relevant to them and their team, very relevant and not just, you know, okay
I have columns and rows but they wire to it, you know, if you listen to James Ferrara,
he's used app script in so many other people have, to the wire to its intelligence. Simple
intelligence, really simple, but it improves productivity to the next level which is customized
to your environment, to your project, to you know, there's like a little task you need
to get done or that takes you days. Now you've got this little wiring that now takes you
minutes. And I'll give you just an example that I use every day and this is the other
point, I think, you made about you know, who do you wait to use this product or this set
of apps before you go, you know, what's the domino and I always tell people we keep our
information, Google is using these products, you know, across the board and the same product
you are, again, except for GovCloud where it's literally different but it's the same
product. And for us, all our data is there and when you think about the kinds of things
that are important to us, that's critical. But back to the wiring, I actually have a
process, very simplistic but takes forever and very imperfect, of collecting what's,
you know, I try to provide road map data and I'm sure a lot of people smirk at that cause
we have a hard time sometimes giving good road map data but we're trying.
[Laughter] >>Jonathan: And one of those things that I
have, since we many products and many product managers, is I just ask them to keep simple
information about what's coming. You know, little things end big and we call epic things.
So Drive would be considered epic, you know, something like that. So, I used to have to
go around and collect and a lot of manual effort, you know, it was really hard and totally
imperfect and I would get pings all the time, marketing, legal, audit, you know, operations,
sales, when is this coming? What's coming next week? What's coming in two weeks? And
we put together a simplistic script, it was probably 25 lines of code that I was able
to write and I haven't written code maybe since I wrote LISP, when you talked about
LISP I was probably the only person that really wrote LISP.
[Laughter] >>Jonathan: And it just, every Monday, collects
that data, sends it out to everyone that has those spreadsheets and pulls it from 15 different
spreadsheets and sends it back to them and says, "This is what's going to be provided
to everyone at Google to talk to our customers and internally and you have 24 hours to fix
your data." And Tuesday, the note goes out automated, to everyone. And it just created
a system where I guess I could actually take Monday's off now.
[Laughter] >>Jonathan: But it really just, the productivity,
that's a small
>>Presenter: The Google 20 percent rule. [Laughter]
>>Jonathan: Exactly. It's a very small sample. What we see customers doing with this just
goes, you know, there's thousands of these cases and it's simplistic but it does empower
everyone.
>>Presenter: Amit, the gentleman over here asked about security and we keep hearing that,
is that still the biggest hurdle that you face when talking about Cloud?
>>Amit: Um, it's one of them. The intensity and the priority of that has actually gone
down. Let me just tell you my own experience and what the questions come to our team, other
questions like okay, how do we do this, how does it integrate with my colored infrastructure,
how do we actually get started, are now right up there alongside or maybe slightly ahead
of security depending on the industry. I suspect that in government it's high up on that list
and other industries like retail and etcetera it's just a non, whatever, you know, we have
enough incredibly large customers who already moved so they have stopped doubting. And most
people will say, "You know, I think you're probably more secure than we are." In most
cases that's actually true. If you look at end device security and what policies people
have, you know, frankly our security infrastructure is top notch as Michele mentioned.
>>Presenter: Let me let them have at ya.
>>Amit: Yeah.
>>Presenter: What questions do you guys have for, yeah, right up here? He's coming back.
He's sort of sauntering isn't he? [Laughter]
[Pause]
>>male #1: Michele, in your opening comment you were talking about the cultural aspects
of this and I, no doubt that your time in government you'd walk in to some command center
and you'd see a bunch of 20 somethings with about 15 different chat windows open in front
of them and I compare that to the demo that you gave, Jonathan, where using hangout in
a very dynamic way and a way that's truly a modern command and control tool. But what
do you think the tipping point is within government, DOD in particular perhaps, that you get away
from a very one dimensional collaborating tool like chat, to something that's much more
dynamic?
>>Michele: I think the key is, is getting that capability out there on the network.
I know in a past role when I was Deputy CIO for the Intel community for the first director
of national intelligence, we were looking at okay, we have a charter integrated community.
And if we could roll out, not just the chat tools that everybody's enjoying but that ability
to instantly connect and we got into debates about quality of the video and was it good
enough for the directors and all that, I said, "Just the ability to connect from" and this
is the slogan, "any team, anytime, anywhere, any device, that would be so powerful." Just
like we can email back and forth and you see somebody's presence and you ask them a quick
question via chat so it gets you out of doing email, now you just say hey dial up or do
a video con, I think just making it available on the network, people will just start to
use it and you start to get that tipping point.
>>Presenter: It's the risk aversion, people are so worried about, and DOD is a unique
situation cause you sometimes have people's lives on the line, but there's a lot of agencies
where that's not the case and still so
>>Michele: And I think it's important too is we roll out pilots cause sometimes people
say, "I'll take two people from this group and two people from this group" you have to
find groups that already need to collaborate, they desperately need to collaborate and then
you say, "Have I got the tool for you." And they become your advocates that help with
that tipping point.
>>Amit: I was with the CIO of the British government and they are trying to convince
us to kind of join the G Cloud initiative which is, you know, their own version. And
we're like, "Okay, we'll look at it" there's different levels of accreditations, CL, CLE3
and 2 and 1 and whatever, anyway, and I was like, "How secure are you guys now? Tell me
about your own use cases." I said, "Do you use Gmail?" I said, "Tell me the truth, I
can go check." [Laughter]
>>Amit: He said, "Yeah, I do." I said, "Why do you use it?" He said, "Cause it's so locked
down I can't get my work done. I gotta respond when I'm at home so I just forward myself
to Gmail. I know it's not correct." I'm like, "You're the CIO of the British government."
And this is happening inside your entire enterprise. Now, you may not like it, you may not believe
it but trust me, Dropbox, use in government, storing things, forwarding things, personal
accounts, video, all of that is occurring. And our view is why not bring it in a controlled
manor with the kinds of things we provide and I think many people are waking up to that
as an option.
>>Michele: And I think to play on that, the U-Gov initiative we tried to do when I was
in government was the idea of we knew everybody was using Gmail and their personal accounts
in the field to get things done, so you say why not give them those same capabilities
they desperately want but do it in a government certified environment and that was the whole
drive for Google's GovCloud. So now you have the opportunity to do that.
>>Presenter: Did you have something to add?
>>Jonathan: We've seen the same thing with, again, you asked the question have we seen
security questions drop off, and I definitely have. And one of the things that triggers
that, I think, is the awareness of how attachments today are being used when you don't use the
Cloud. People don't know they're so insecure when you have attachments and you go to just
view it, it's downloaded to your machine and a lot of you, of course, know that, but I
always compel people, go look at the download directory of any machine in your network.
Just look at the download directory and tell me if there's something there that shouldn't
be, that you don't expect to be there and it's shocking. So just using the core tools,
I think, is the first step and then, like Amit said, when you bring the other things
in and say let's put controls around this it's just so much more powerful and secure
it seems like an easy win but the security questions just go way down.
>>Michele: I think Eric hit on, too, I would just say, is having your data in the Cloud
and be able to do the logs and Google's a data driven company, you start to know what
normal looks like and you start to see those anomalies, think of the compromise we had
of information had we been doing really good audit logs that you could see somebody doing
massive downloads and maybe send off some warning signals before it hits the press.
By being able to bring your data into the Cloud you have the ability to that kind of
audit capability and provide better security than you do today with the separate air gap
systems.
>>Jonathan: And customize your own. I mean the APIs and app script and things like that
let you do your own if you don't like what we provide.
>>Presenter: Awesome, other questions?
>>male #2: Sorry guys, I got lots of questions. [Laughter]
>>male #2: I could take over the whole thing.
This question is about doing the change management. So, I'm from the DOD, obviously, and many
people justify their job by what they do and their location in the hierarchy. We are very
deep, we are not flat like Google, we're a very deep organization hierarchy and I have
people in my own section, nobody can look to see where I'm from.
[Laughter] >>male #2: I have people in my own section
that think that if we were to go to a Cloud like this that we would, they would lose their
job. And there are, there's, so how, I'm asking you for your advice on your experience as
you've dealt with organizations that might be similar to mine that, to me it's somewhat
obvious, "Hey, we're gonna give you a different job" because now it's not the CIO that's handing
out computers it's the chief proc business process officer making sure that we are doing
correct business processes and you'll help with that.
>>Presenter: Can I ask a question?
>>male #2: I can't seem to get that through people's heads.
>>Presenter: Can I ask you a question?
>>male #2: Sure.
>>Presenter: How much is budget end up drive, we'll call you John
[Laughter]
>>male #2: My name's Stewart Lyles, I'm okay [Laughter]
>>Presenter: How much does budget end up driving those, almost forcing those to happen? Forcing
the questions, okay we just can't keep doing everything we were doing before, is that even
come into the discussion?
>>male #2:Oh yeah, you're hittin' on a big point as far, for my own experience that I'm
having with the job I'm in now but they've cut my budget so much, I'm the CIO, that they
can't cut it anymore. I need all the people that they have even if I were to do, if they
let me change all the way over to Google, or whatever, some Cloud provider. So, I'm
really more interested in the cultural change and how to make that
>>Amit: I can certainly take, you know, just from customers and you should talk with them
and say what ends up happening is the role changes. It becomes more about service delivery
than about assets. If you know, asset management and there is no joy in running email systems.
Trust me, we run them, they are very hard to run.
[Laughter] >>Amit: and overtime there's also not much
skill set that these people are building for their careers, I mean, think about it. Would
you rather be working on new sexy Cloud stuff where you can create great innovation and
that's the word that's actually coming back a lot for CIOs, they're becoming innovation
officers by saying, "I'm not gonna be asset centric, I'm gonna be outcome and service
delivery centric" and they've changed their titles, actually to reflect that and then
you bring the best technology and make it outcome based and then start to focus on the
user. You know, what are they able to do? How do we get the more stuff? And the dynamic
changes, the dynamic inside the organization changes from and we are the protectors of
data; we are the enablers to make you incredibly, you know, much more productive. That's what
I've seen happen in organizations that have deployed.
>>Presenter: And Michele we've been talking for years about the role of the CIO in government,
if some organizations, if they don't stay ahead of this, all of a sudden the CIO won't
matter anymore.
>>Michele: Well, the current standard business model for government IT is definitely not
sustainable and our budget cuts are forcing people to make some tough choices. But another
you hit on is cyber is a buzz word as well. And so you look at, and I know sitting in
a room full of people in a different uniform then you is someone who had to rollout the
IT but then another person responsible for I have to find personnel that I can train
in cyber security. And, so, if we can offload some of the folks worry about assets tracking
and migrate them over and retrain them in a field that has become critical, that's great
value added. So I think, actually, outsourcing a capability that is not unique to the government
mission to someone to whom cyber security is a core competency then the people can be
retrained in a field that is critical to the current government.
>>Jonathan: And I have just one idea for how you might go about doing this which is think
is part of the process so you can plan ahead, is almost take inventory of the things you
know, maybe cyber security is one of the obvious ones where we just, we need more people and
we know we can't get them but we need and then maybe a set of things that maybe people
on the staff could dream and say if you didn't have to do your current job, which you probably
don't like, what would you think we should do? What do you think we could get done and
add value to whatever, you know, our real mission is. Our real mission not managing
email, you know, what is the mission of the department of defense and what can you do
with technology, what would you like to do? And if you have that inventory it starts feeling
like people will be looking now for an opportunity to say, "Okay, now we can start getting rid
of some of the drudgery that you've got in the technology, the asset management part
of it." And I think people, then, get involved in trying to release themselves of their job
and say, "I've got my eye set on that thing in your inventory. I love that project." You
know, the geo mapping stuff and some of this stuff is actually attainable by non technicians,
so you don't even need somebody that technical, you know, the retraining is, feels sometimes
we live in technologies really impossible. People are like, "I can't learn how to program
in C. You know, all of a sudden I'm just gonna shift and learn?" No, you don't have to. Here's
how you do it, it's four pages online if I actually take terabytes of data and put it
on a map, it's like wow, look how that will help the department of defense, like it's
an amazing thing. And I just think if you have that inventory ready for people, they're
much more willing to give up their jobs and to say, "Yeah, let's start working on getting
that stuff in so I can actually release myself of this." So, just an idea.
>>Presenter: The challenge, of course, is that anyone who's been in government more
than 10 minutes knows that, they always say, "we'll be able to reinvest those back into
some kind cool thing." and then that never happens. So that's part of the concern.
[Laughter]
>>Michele: Actually
>>Jonathan: It's just a shift. You just kind of take it into your own hands and say, "Okay,
I need 10 people you can't give them to me. I'll go and I'm gonna find them. I'm gonna
find them." I'm gonna get productivity over here, push those ten people over here.
>>Presenter: We're out of time and I'm gonna give Amit the last word, but what do you hope
people walk out of here thinking, knowing, what should be their parting thought?
>>Amit: Google is serious about bringing great, beautiful consumer products with the right
controls and features and capabilities for government so that transformers like this
can actually go and get great new outcomes for their constituents. That's what we, that's
our mission. And we hope that you'll try something. It doesn't have to be big, doesn't have to
be small, it is so easy to go do something and try and just get a feeling for what it's
like and we really would like to help you. So, thank you for coming.
>>Presenter: I think, thank you very much, I think it is amazing times that we live in
and I started off saying the best of times, worst of times and we all know what the worst
of times are. But I think what Amy said earlier where she almost poo pooed a lot of the changes
that they're making as small. I don't think there are small changes, in particularly in
the work environment that you're in everyday. Go out and do it, you know you can. Thank
you very much for doing this. [Music Plays]