Looks like our friend Nick Nicholaou over at MBS, has some company in the local admin debate (full article) – the Google Enterprise Blog highlights an interview in CIO magazine with Douglas Merrill, Google’s CIO.

A few quotes from the article:

  • Google information systems believes in choice, not control. The goal of choice is to let your talent express their talent in the most effective way they can.
  • We really believe in choice, not control, so the number of things employees can’t do is pretty small. And then the infrastructure is pretty smart and pretty self-healing. Our machines come already imaged with security controls. People can install their own software if they want to. We have lots of remote access options, and we assume people will work from cafés and other things, so we do lots to make that possible.
  • My ability to do choice not control is profoundly affected by some of the changes in the security model…I have a very big focus on defense at depth—lots and lots of different things in the infrastructure and the applications that protect themselves.

I think I am slowly being swayed towards the choice side, but I am not fully convinced yet.