Mayer Declares That It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time at Yahoo (allthingsd.com) |
Mayer Declares That It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time at Yahoo (allthingsd.com) |
Those two steps will tell me if Mayer, a supposedly "technology" focussed CEO will be able to go head-head with Yahoo! IT. (It should say something that I even have to suggest the CEO of the company needs to go "head-head" with the IT organization)
I've seen much the same thing happen at a company I worked at in the early late 1990's and early 2000's. The CIO had a heroic moment years ago and used the political capital to run IT as he saw fit, catering to the email/web needs on the sales/business side, but demonizing engineers who had more stringent needs. (Even to the point of a crony calling the complaining engineers "terrorists" in a public speech shortly after 9-11.)
A real question would be "What do you have to do against company policy in order to get your job done?"
Now that's a real good question.
In more details: not having a parking barrier means you can just drive in the lot without stopping your car, opening your window, scanning your badge, putting your badge away, starting your car again just to stop just after in a spot. I don't know where Yahoo! HQs are but I'm guessing they are little use to check who is parking on their lot. So what does that change for employees? It removes one useless step in your morning routine.
Turnstiles are similar. Turnstiles are a bit uncomfortable and unnatural. If you can remove them, it just simpler. I doubt they just let anyone in, but you can put a couple of security people, a badge scanner and you're good to go. I know Facebook has something where you just badge and walks through without having to push a hard metal bar with your leg, hoping it won't catch your gym bag.
I'm skipping the steps because you stopped too far from the scanner
Try asking yourself the opposite question... "Can you change culture by adding turnstiles and parking barriers?"
I'll even make the argument that the Blackberry might have been the better choice in 2007/2008, and, just possibly, sneaking into 2009. The iPhone lacked reasonable exchange support for it's first iteration, push email wasn't there, and the Mobile Data Management (MDM) policies and security were slim to none.
But any company that was agile, and technologically savvy, and particularly those that were focussed on consumer digital strategies, started shifting over to the popular smartphones (IOS first, Android Second) by 2011 at the very latest. Yahoo! IT's love of the blackberry has held that company back. If every one of their engineers, and executives lived on an Android/iPhone, their mobile strategy would be seeing a lot more love.
The Department of Defense might make an argument for using blackberries. Yahoo! can't.
I don't remember 2008-2009 all that well, but I think Airwatch was 2009, and there was some weak Zenprise support in late 2008.
I don't know if that was the case at Yahoo, though, and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they were originally meant for something more useful, like making sure there were enough parking spaces open for Yahoo employees.
Aaah, there you go. See, I'm way to cynical for that. Too many years of actually working for (or with) stereotypical Initech[1] style companies.