Our study of eBay's organizational transformation, just released
I and two former students of mine, Nicole Schuetz and Anna Kovaleva, just completed a wonderful case study of eBay’s transition to more efficient data center operations. As readers of this blog know, the barriers to achieving higher efficiency data centers are not primarily technical. Instead, they are mainly problems of management, incentives, and responsibilities. This is why I’ve been pushing for years to create case studies of companies that have actually been successful in improving the efficiency of their operations. I’ve encountered companies who have accomplished such improvements in the past, but none have ever wanted to talk about them, until now.
The Executive Summary of the case study is below.
eBay Inc.: A Case Study of Organizational Change Underlying Technical Infrastructure Optimization
Nicole Schuetz*, Anna Kovaleva*, and Jonathan Koomey**
*Stanford Graduate School of Business & Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, School of Earth Sciences, Stanford University
**Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, Stanford University
Executive Summary
This work provides a case study of the organizational changes necessary at eBay Inc. to support the development and operation of efficient data center infrastructure, hardware, and software. As a part of this process, the eBay Inc. infrastructure Engineering and Operations team (responsible for the delivery of technical services including Cloud services and data center hosting) embarked on a multi-year journey to dramatically improve the efficiency of the company’s technical infrastructure, and to connect infrastructure productivity to business drivers. eBay Inc.’s technical achievements in improving energy efficiency and decreasing infrastructure operations cost has been well documented elsewhere; instead this study focuses on illuminating the changes to eBay Inc.’s organizational structure and culture of the IT organization that began in 2008 and are still ongoing today. In addition to a literature review, the authors conducted in-person interviews with members of eBay Inc.’s staff within the IT organization between May and August of 2013.
Download the case study here. To watch video of me and eBay’s Dean Nelson discussing some of the key issues emerging from the case study and the other innovations just announced for eBay’s Salt Lake City data center, go here (the interview is at 22 minutes into the video file).
