If you have got ever labored at any sizable firm, the phrase “IT” in all probability doesn’t conjure up many heat emotions. If you’re working for an outdated, conventional enterprise firm, you in all probability don’t count on the rest, although. If you’re working for a contemporary tech firm, although, chances are high your expectations are a bit increased. And when you’re on the scale of an organization like Facebook, loads of the third-party providers that work for smaller corporations merely don’t work anymore.
To focus on how Facebook thinks about its IT technique and why it now builds most of its IT instruments in-house, I sat down with the corporate’s CIO, Atish Banerjea, at its Menlo Park headquarter.
Before becoming a member of Facebook in 2016 to go up what it now calls its “Enterprise Engineering” group, Banerjea was the CIO or CTO at corporations like NBCUniversal, Dex One and Pearson.
“If you think about Facebook 10 years ago, we were very much a traditional IT shop at that point,” he informed me. “We were responsible for just core IT services, responsible for compliance and responsible for change management. But basically, if you think about the trajectory of the company, were probably about 2,000 employees around the end of 2010. But at the end of last year, we were close to 37,000 employees.”
Traditionally, IT organizations depend on third-party instruments and software program, however as Facebook grew to this present measurement, many third-party options merely weren’t in a position to scale with it. At that time, the group determined to take issues into its personal palms and go from being a standard IT group to at least one that might construct instruments in-house. Today, the corporate is just about self-sufficient on the subject of working its IT operations, however getting thus far took some time.
“We had to pretty much reinvent ourselves into a true engineering product organization and went to a full ‘build’ mindset,” stated Banerjea. That’s not one thing each group is clearly in a position to do, however, as Banerjea joked, one of many the reason why this works at Facebook “is because we can — we have that benefit of the talent pool that is here at Facebook.”

The firm then took this expertise and mainly replicated the form of group it might assistance on the client aspect to construct out its IT instruments, with engineers, designers, product managers, content material methods, individuals and analysis. “We also made the decision at that point that we will hold the same bar and we will hold the same standards so that the products we create internally will be as world-class as the products we’re rolling out externally.”
One of the instruments that wasn’t as much as Facebook’s scaling challenges was video conferencing. The firm was utilizing a third-party device for that, however that simply wasn’t working anymore. In 2018, Facebook was consuming about 20 million convention minutes per thirty days. In 2019, the corporate is now at 40 million per thirty days.
Besides the plain scaling problem, Facebook can be doing this to have the ability to provide its workers customized software program that matches their workflows. It’s one factor to adapt current third-party instruments, in spite of everything, and one other to construct customized instruments to assist an organization’s enterprise processes.
Banerjea informed me that creating this new construction was a comparatively simple promote inside the corporate. Every transformation comes with its personal challenges, although. For Facebook’s Enterprise  Engineering group, that included having to recruit new talent units into the group. The first few months of this course of had been painful, Banerjea admitted, as the corporate needed to up-level the abilities of many current workers and shed a big variety of contractors. “There are certain areas where we really felt that we had to have Facebook DNA in order to make sure that we were actually building things the right way,” he defined.
Facebook’s construction creates an extra problem for the group. When you’re becoming a member of Facebook as a brand new worker, you have got loads of groups to select from, in spite of everything, and in case you have the selection of engaged on Instagram or WhatsApp or the core Facebook app — all of which contact thousands and thousands of individuals — engaged on inside instruments with fewer than 40,000 customers doesn’t sound all that thrilling.
“When young kids who come straight from college and they come into Facebook, they don’t know any better. So they think this is how the world is,” Banerjea stated. “But when we have experienced people come in who have worked at other companies, the first thing I hear is ‘oh my goodness, we’ve never seen internal tools of this caliber before.’ The way we recruit, the way we do performance management, the way we do learning and development — every facet of how that employee works has been touched in terms of their life cycle here.”

Facebook first began constructing these inside instruments round 2012, although it wasn’t till Banerjea joined in 2016 that it rebranded the group and arrange at the moment’s construction. He additionally famous that a few of these unique instruments had been good, however less than the caliber workers would count on from the corporate.
“The really big change that we went through was up-leveling our building skills to really become at the same caliber as if we were to build those products for an external customer. We want to have the same experience for people internally.”
The firm went so far as changing and rebuilding the business Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system it had been utilizing for years. If there’s one factor that large corporations depend on, it’s their ERP techniques, given they usually deal with all the pieces from finance and HR to provide chain administration and manufacturing. That’s mainly what all of their backend instruments depend on (and what corporations like SAP, Oracle and others cost some huge cash for). “In that 2016/2017 time frame, we realized that that was not a very good strategy,” Banerjea stated. In Facebook’s case, the outdated ERP dealt with the stock administration for its information facilities, amongst many different issues. When that outdated system went down, the corporate couldn’t ship elements to its information facilities.
“So what we started doing was we started peeling off all the business logic from our backend ERP and we started rewriting it ourselves on our own platform,” he defined. “Today, for our ERP, the backend is just the database, but all the business logic, all of the functionality is actually all custom written by us on our own platform. So we’ve completely rewritten our ERP, so to speak.”
In follow, all of which means ideally, Facebook’s workers face far much less friction once they be part of the corporate, for instance, or when they should substitute a damaged laptop computer, get a brand new telephone to check options or just order a brand new display screen for his or her desk.
One basic use case is onboarding, the place new workers get their firm laptop computer, cellphones and entry to all of their techniques, for instance. At Facebook, that’s additionally the beginning of a six-week bootcamp that will get new engineers up to the mark with how issues work at Facebook. Back in 2016, when new lessons tended to nonetheless have lower than 200 new workers, that was nonetheless principally a handbook activity. Today, with way more incoming workers, the Enterprise Engineering group has automated most of that — and that features managing the provision chain that ensures the laptops and telephones for these new workers are literally accessible.
But the group additionally constructed the backend that powers the corporate’s extra conventional IT assist desks, the place workers can stroll up and get their points mounted (and passwords reset).

To discuss extra about how Facebook handles the logistics of that, I sat down with Koshambi Shah, who heads up the corporate’s Enterprise Supply Chain group, which just about handles each piece of {hardware} and software program the corporate delivers and deploys to its workers world wide (and that international nature of the corporate brings its personal challenges and extra complexity). The group, which has fewer than 30 individuals, is made up of workers with expertise in manufacturing, retail and client provide chains.
Typically, enterprises provide their workers a minimal set of decisions on the subject of the laptops and telephones they subject to their workers, and the working techniques that may run on them are typically restricted. Facebook’s engineers have to have the ability to take a look at new options on a variety of units and working techniques. There are, in spite of everything, nonetheless customers on the iPhone 4s or BlackBerry that the corporate needs to assist. To do that, Shah’s group really makes hundreds of SKUs accessible to workers and is ready to ship 98% of them inside three days or much less. It’s not simply sending a laptop computer through FedEx, although. “We do the budgeting, the financial planning, the forecasting, the supply/demand balancing,” Shah stated. “We do the asset management. We make sure the asset — what is needed, when it’s needed, where it’s needed — is there consistently.”
In many giant corporations, each asset request is double guessed. Facebook, alternatively, locations loads of belief in its workers, it appears. There’s a self-service portal, the Enterprise Store, that permits workers to simply request telephones, laptops, chargers (which get misplaced lots) and different equipment as wanted, with out having to attend for approval (although should you request a laptop computer each week, any individual will certainly wish to have a phrase with you). Everything is clearly tracked intimately, however the general expertise is nearer to buying at a web-based retailer than utilizing an enterprise asset administration system. The Enterprise Store will inform you the place a tool is on the market, for instance, so you possibly can choose it up your self (however you possibly can all the time have it delivered to your desk, too, as a result of that is, in spite of everything, a Silicon Valley firm).

For equipment, Facebook additionally provides self-service merchandising machines, and workers can stroll as much as the assistance desk.
The firm additionally lately launched an Amazon Locker-style setup that permits workers to take a look at units as wanted. At these good lockers, workers merely should scan their badge, select a tool and, as soon as the suitable door has opened, choose up the telephone, pill, laptop computer or VR units they had been in search of and transfer on. Once they’re finished with it, they’ll come again and test the system again in. No questions requested. “We trust that people make the right decision for the good of the company,” Shah stated. For laptops and different equipment, the corporate does present the worker the value of these objects, although, so it’s clear how a lot a sure request prices the corporate. “We empower you with the data for you to make the best decision for your company.”
Talking about value, Shah informed me the Supply Chain group tracks plenty of metrics. One of these is clearly value. “We do give back about 4% year-over-year, that’s our commitment back to the businesses in terms of the efficiencies we build for every user we support. So we measure ourselves in terms of cost per supported user. And we give back 4% on an annualized basis in the efficiencies.”
Unsurprisingly, the corporate has by now gathered sufficient information about worker requests (Shah stated the group fulfills about half one million transactions per 12 months) that it may use machine studying to know developments and be proactive about changing units, for instance.

Facebooks’ Enterprise Engineering group doesn’t simply assist inside prospects, although. Another fascinating facet to Facebook’s Enterprise Engineering group is that it additionally runs the corporate’s inside and exterior occasions, together with the likes of F8, the corporate’s annual developer convention. To do that, the corporate constructed out convention rooms that may seat hundreds of individuals, with the entire logistics that go along with that.
The firm additionally confirmed me considered one of its latest assembly rooms the place there are dozens of microphones and audio system hanging from the ceiling that make it simpler for everyone within the room to take part in a gathering and be heard by everyone else. That’s a part of what the group’s “New Builds” group is liable for, and one thing that’s doable as a result of the corporate additionally takes a really hands-on method to constructing and managing its workplaces.
Facebook additionally runs plenty of small studios in its Menlo Park and New York workplaces, the place each workers and the occasional exterior VIP can host Facebook Live movies.

Indeed, reside video, it appears, is without doubt one of the cornerstones of how Facebook workers collaborate and assist workers who make money working from home. Typically, you’d simply use the digicam in your laptop computer or perhaps a webcam related to your desktop to take action. But as a result of Facebook really produces its personal digicam system with the consumer-oriented Portal, Banerjea’s group determined to make use of that.
“What we have done is we have actually re-engineered the Portal,” he informed me. “We have connected with all of our video conferencing systems in the rooms. So if I have a Portal at home, I can dial into my video conferencing platform and have a conference call just like I’m sitting in any other conference room here in Facebook. And all that software, all the engineering on the portal, that has been done by our teams — some in partnership with our production teams, but a lot of it has been done with Enterprise Engineering.”
Unsurprisingly, there are additionally teams that handle a number of the core infrastructure and safety for the corporate’s inside instruments and networks. All of these instruments run in the identical information facilities as Facebook’s consumer-facing purposes, although they’re clearly sandboxed and remoted from them.

It’s one factor to construct all of those instruments for inside use, however now, the corporate can be beginning to consider the way it can convey a few of these instruments it constructed for inside use to a few of its exterior prospects. You could not consider Facebook as an enterprise firm, however with its Workplace collaboration device, it has an enterprise service that it sells externally, too. Last 12 months, for the primary time, Workplace added a brand new function that was incubated inside Enterprise Engineering. That function was a model of Facebook’s public Safety Check that the Enterprise Engineering group had initially tailored to the corporate’s personal inside use.
“Many of these things that we are building for Facebook, because we are now very close partners with our Workplace team — they are in the enterprise software business and we are the enterprise software group for Facebook — and many [features] we are building for Facebook are of interest to Workplace customers.”
As Workplace hit the market, Banerjea ended up speaking to the CIOs of potential customers, together with the likes of Delta Air Lines, about how Facebook itself used Workplace internally. But as corporations began to undertake Workplace, they realized that they wanted integrations with current third-party providers like ERP platforms and Salesforce. Those corporations then requested Facebook if it might construct these integrations or work with companions to make them accessible. But on the identical time, these prospects bought uncovered to a number of the instruments that Facebook itself was constructing internally.
“Safety Check was the first one,” Banerjea stated. “We are actually working on three more products this year.” He wouldn’t say what these are, in fact, however there’s clearly a pipeline of instruments that Facebook has constructed for inside use that it’s now trying to commercialize. That’s fairly uncommon for any IT group, which, in spite of everything, tends to solely deal with inside prospects. I don’t count on Facebook to pivot to an enterprise software program firm anytime quickly, however initiatives like this are clearly essential to the corporate and, in some methods, to the morale of the group.
This creates a little bit of friction, too, although, provided that the Enterprise Engineering group’s mission is to construct inside instruments for Facebook. “We are now figuring out the deployment model,” Banerjea stated. Who, for instance, goes to assist the exterior instruments the group constructed? Is it the Enterprise Engineering group or the Workplace group?
Chances are then, that Facebook will convey a number of the instruments it constructed for inside use to extra enterprises in the long term. That undoubtedly places a special spin on the concept of the consumerization of enterprise tech. Clearly, not each firm operates on the scale of Facebook and must construct its personal instruments — and even some corporations that might profit from it don’t have the assets to take action. For Facebook, although, that transfer appears to have paid off and the instruments I noticed whereas speaking to the group undoubtedly seemed extra user-friendly than any off-the-shelf enterprise instruments I’ve seen at different giant corporations.