In May 2016 I finished my time as CTO with Lifes2good where I had spent just over 4 years. The company had grown massively but I decided it was time to go to the vendor side of things so I joined Jobscience, THE recruitment management solution on the Salesforce platform. Of course I have some history with Jobscience, as I had implemented it back in 2008 while I was working in recruitment industry. Which was my introduction to Salesforce and cloud computing in general; and the rest as they say is history.
In 4 years with Lifes2good we achieved a lot. The great team there allowed me to follow what some might say were unusual approaches to running an IT function within a company. We implemented Salesforce and utilised it for every area of the business (sales cloud, service cloud, appexchange and custom apps we build ourselves). We implemented Box.com to replace internal file storage. We re-platformed the groups entire ecommerce systems. And we implemented Jitterbit to allow all the systems, internal and external to pass the data between them. And we linked it all together! In a growing company like Lifes2good, it was essential to be able to move quickly and provide solutions fast. The platforms we put together really worked with this.
With that in mind, I decided to put down some ideas/thoughts/advice that I would share with a new CTO or senior IT managers or anyone interested in running an IT teams:
- Buy, don’t build: Too often IT people want to design, develop and release their own products. This is ok for software development companies, but for internal IT resources I believe your role is to improve the business and processes using technology. Not creating a development company within a company. Instead concentrate on working with the business to provide solutions and getting the solutions to work together with each other.
- Outsource where ever Possible: Having huge numbers of internal resources is not always necessary. It means more work maintaining larger teams and competing with others for the best staff. Utilising outsourced partners allows you to avoid that. I worked with some excellent partners on the support and development
- Don’t use every product on the market: The more systems you use, the more integration points you will need, the more support time you need, the more points of failure you introduce. Minimise the products in your system architecture by using fewer systems.
- Provide a solution. Otherwise someone else will do it for you: There are so many free and paid products on the web today. Some of these platforms might not be as secure as you think so if you are not providing the business with solutions you can expect that they will start to use their own. Shadow IT is the scare term for this but whatever you call it, you cannot fight against it if you are not getting the business solutions
- Understand the business: We kept a small team, and emphasised understanding the business. Outsourcing helped us with this, and allowed the team to concentrate on the solution, rather the fixing problems!
Of course, these are just my own opinions so feel free to take them or leave them. Have a read of this Silicon Republic 5 minute CIO interview I did during my time in Lifes2good.