SVP and CIO of Enterprise, Pradip Sitaram, oversees the direction and management of the information technology portfolio for Enterprise Community Partners, Inc. Enterprise is a national organization that creates and advocates for affordable homes in thriving communities, linked to jobs, health care, strong schools, and transportation. In a few short years, Sitaram has led the modernization of the company’s IT department by using cloud technology to automate business processes, bring together disparate data sources, and build custom applications. Learn how in this latest installment of the “IT Visionaries” series.

1. You’ve said you inherited “a little bit of a mess” at Enterprise. Describe it for us.

The technology was hopelessly obsolete. We had issues with every facet of the technology stack. The systems were really more in the way than actually helping people do their job. There was a huge landscape of very complex and either extremely siloed applications and databases that did not talk to anything else, or applications that were so tightly integrated you couldn’t change anything without breaking something else. In many ways, IT was simply not delivering what the business needed. The company had lost faith in IT. As a result, IT’s morale was low. It seemed like the deck was stacked against us.

2. Tell us about your board’s transition from skeptical to enthusiastic.

 
I was hired after a very long interview process. The company was trying to be very careful with who they picked as their new CIO. When I proposed to not just bring in this “new” cloud technology, but also a new methodology – agile – as well as restructure the team, you can imagine the healthy degree of skepticism. Remember this was back in 2010 when “cloud” was not in the common vernacular. I recall them looking at me and saying: “What is this cloud thing you’re talking about?” Two years later, almost to the day, I gave the board a status update, along with the business executives. We were able to tell them that we had achieved all the main goals we had set out to accomplish. They actually applauded.

3.  Were you able to show actual ROI to the board?

Our business has 1700 properties which translates to thousands of apartments. We have the fiscal oversight responsibility for them. Each of these properties sends us financial reports, tax papers, you name it. It was a hugely manual process and a problem Enterprise had been trying to solve for years. One integration proposal said “Phase 1” was going to take $750-thousand and nine months, which is code for it’s not going to get done. Working with Salesforce partner Dell Boomi, one of my developers built an automation solution in just three weeks. Our cost exposure was only $1500. So when the board said “How do we know this cloud thing is real?,” I could say, “We’ve already used it to solve a problem.”

4. Why was the agility of a cloud platform so important?

We often propose solutions that are so new to the business and so completely different from what they would have imagined that building a working prototype is much more effective than trying to describe the concept in a document. Cloud-based technology is very conducive to this kind of development, because you can dip your toe in to test the water before making a wholesale commitment. I told my IT team that we had to earn the trust of the business. How do you earn trust? By building credibility. How do you build credibility? By showing results quickly. How do you show results quickly? You pick the right technology, apply the right process, and have the right people who can work in an agile environment. We announced a release to production every four to six weeks. And with every new application, we had another building block in our new strategy.

5. You’ve also emphasized the importance of laying down architecture first.

If you were going to construct a building you wouldn’t dig a hole for the foundation without blueprints, would you? Similarly, if you were trying to construct a community, you wouldn’t dare start building without blueprints either. You might build one building. The gas station might come a year later. The grocery store might come in a few months. But you’d know exactly where they were going to go. It’s the same for systems in an organization. You need a blueprint, you need a plan, you need a sequence of when these things happen, and you need to know what the interdependencies are. If you do that right, when you start building in the cloud, such as on the Salesforce1 Platform, you move lightning fast.

6. Has this speed improved your relationship with the business side?

How often do you hear the business telling IT to slow down? Never. If IT deploys a sound architecture supported by the right technology, like cloud, supported by the right methodology, like agile, you know what happens? The business comes to the realization all by themselves that they need to answer their process questions first and that doing so is the key to building a useful system. That can take time. Once the process issues are addressed and the architecture is in place, this technology allows the teams to deliver solutions very rapidly. I believe IT at Enterprise really is now looked upon as a true partner with the business and not just a service provider.  

7. It sounds like even you are surprised by the success of your strategy.

Who knew that we could use a technology that was known for CRM and use it to run an entire company? We are literally running our core business operations on the Salesforce1 Platform. We’ve built about 50 apps in the last three years and we’re gradually marching through the whole company building applications for every department. The results that we’re seeing, the adoption, and the user buy-in is just astronomical. I’ve been in IT for 25 years; I’ve never seen anything like it. Nothing comes close to what we’ve accomplished with this technology. We’re doing things four-to-eight times faster and seeing a 90% cost savings over traditional development in places.



Do you want to see better business results faster? Do you have the tools to innovate in a social and mobile world? Is Platform as a Service for you? This e-book cuts through the buzz to show the benefits platform as a service (PaaS) delivers from the recognized cloud platform leader, Salesforce.