As VP of IT Global Applications at Symantec, Sheri Rhodes is primarily responsible for leading application services, from sustaining and monitoring, to development. She has grown her team, which sits within the company’s 900 person IT department, from 40 to 300 in just two years. As a part of our ongoing “IT Visionaries” series, Rhodes shares how they are driving development at Symantec and the tools they are using to do so.

1. What was the catalyst for the 700% growth of your team?

We were 95% outsourced and made a conscious decision to drive development and change within IT using internal resources, so we brought development, design, and the related roles and functions back in house. Our goal was to be more agile and add more business value, as well as stay better connected to our stakeholders. The definition of value is in constant motion and it should be. Being aligned with the business is extremely important as IT evolves its services.

2. What are some of the solutions you are building on the Salesforce1 Platform?

There are five applications that we’ve developed on Force.com: A custom sales app to understand the data driven pipeline and where we are from a potential opportunities standpoint. We’ve built an app to manage our discounting strategy. On the IT services side, we have end user support sites, where you can go in and get your device questions and problems addressed. We built an application to track the types of inquiries we’re resolving to allow for improved on-site ticket management. And we have an app that we use for rebate payment tracking and processing.
 

3. What are the benefits of building applications using PaaS?

Building applications from scratch can sometimes be daunting, not just from a systems perspective, but from a user perspective. The reason I like Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and the Salesforce1 Platform specifically, is because the foundational aspects of the application stack already exist. You have standard structures and flows out of the box. And then it comes down to building on those. When you’re developing custom apps, you must have your end process nailed to a very granular level to be successful. Otherwise you’ll spin on topics.

4. How are you leveraging mobile?

Mobility has been a big play for us. It’s all about adoption and if you can drive adoption by making the application or service you’re offering more consumable, that’s going to reduce the need for application proliferation in other areas. People aren’t going to seek out endpoint solutions if they know they can go to a key cornerstone service and get the majority of their needs taken care of. It’s not always just feature and function driven. It’s also about accessing the application from anywhere, which is why mobility is so important.

5. What are your big IT initiatives going forward?

In today’s environment you have highly integrated ecosystems that talk to multiple services or apps, so maintaining resiliency across that whole footprint is very important. Rationalizing and modernizing the portfolio is also key. That’s one of the reasons we’ve driven more to cornerstone applications. Because a particular solution can go deep, but when they can go deep and wide -- as far as having the ability to do many functions -- it’s very useful. This is what you see with some of the PaaS offerings and larger cloud solutions. These were disparate functions in the past.

6. How do you go about introducing new technology to your IT team?

It’s about understanding the kind of problem we’re trying to solve and then relating that technology and how it’s going to add value or solve the problem. And we always come to the table with options. We’ve found that it is received more positively that way. We build a lot of proof of concepts (POCs) that we test in our Force.com sandboxes. Understanding what is native or inherent to the application being offered is key. We can do that through POCs or demos. Once we’ve selected a technology, conducting conference room pilots is also part of the strategy.

7. What’s your advice for other IT leaders considering a cloud platform?

When waterfall was very popular, I think we all learned the do’s and don'ts of a very linear approach. Iteration can be extremely valuable for high touch, high demand features and functions. So be sure to identify your stakeholders early on so you have a cohesive team to move each project forward. The earlier the user engagement happens, the better. And reach out to the greater PaaS community. What other customers are doing on cloud platforms is readily available. Take advantage of the user and developer community. They will talk about what worked and what didn’t.

Do you want to focus more on driving business growth instead of infrastructure? Do you have the tools to innovate faster 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.