Dive Brief:
- Tim Campos, former CIO of Facebook, said in 2010, Facebook’s IT group numbered about 40 and focused primarily on things like email and PC support, The Wall Street Journal reports.
- Today, the IT department at Facebook numbers about 500 full time employees and another 500 contractors, focusing on things like building new IT capabilities that don’t exist anywhere else. Just six years ago, IT at Facebook was "very much a function that existed to just provide the basics like email and PC support," Campos said.
- The social network's IT team is split into a build organization and a run organization, supporting the company’s estimated 1.79 billion monthly users with a variety of technologies and constant improvements to enhance user satisfaction.
Dive Insight:
Campos recently left Facebook to launch his own enterprise software company.
Facebook’s evolution is a great example of how technology is changing business, and vice versa. The social network may be an extreme example, but CIOs at many other types of organizations have witnessed similar shifts.
There's an increased emphasis placed on IT departments innovating to help the company's bottom line. That transition is in part possible because companies don't always have to support their own infrastructure thanks to the rise of "as a Service" models. That frees up staff time to innovate and develop more creative ways to use technology.
