Salesforce.com CIO Ross Meyercord has spent the last two and a half years leading and growing an information technology team that is also influencing the broader IT industry. In the following “IT Visionaries” interview, Meyercord shares how his department is taking the preeminent cloud technology the company offers and applying it internally in creative and amazing ways. You can also hear more on this endeavor from a member of Meyercord’s team by tuning into the free webinar recording,"An Inside Look at How Salesforce Runs IT with CTO of IT Brett Colbert.”

1. What’s been the big focus for you this year?

We’re calling it frictionless user experience. How do we make it the easiest for users to get to the tasks done they want? Everybody has a phone in their hand all the time anyway. If you can make a super compelling UI with excellent design tools, without a lot of typing, people will choose to use that. My belief is, you don’t have to push people to mobile. If you build it simple enough, they will just show up.

2. And you’ve been having “fun” building applications for the business side?

Fun is actually not a bad word for CIOs. What’s been both interesting and fun is we now have the ability to have the discussion on what’s a simple, high-volume use case does the business have today that’s a pain. As people throw out what those items are, in almost in every case we can solve them on the Salesforce1 Platform. It’s been a nice universal tool kit. The unintended benefit of leveraging the Salesforce1 Mobile App is, because the real estate is so precious on mobile, we have to boil down the use case to the real essence of what we are really trying to solve.

3. Can you tell us about some of these apps?

We’ve rolled out an IT tickets app. That’s our nice, easy front end for people to be able to log tickets. We’ve also rolled out an integrated “Approval Central,” which sits in the Salesforce1 Mobile App as an approval notification in action. The idea is you can take — whether it’s a Workday approval notification, or a Concur expense, or a deal approval — and we funnel it through a UI, so as an executive you can see what you need to approve from your phone, versus having to natively log into each individual one.

4. Who is doing most of the building?

Our professional developers have figured out the tips and tricks to leverage the Salesforce1 Platform pretty seamlessly. And folks who aren’t the hard core devs are also jumping in. We’ve done a couple internal hackathons and one of our winners was a development manager who hadn’t coded in years. He did it all declarative and was actually one of the top winners, going up against guys who have been hardcore Apex devs. I thought that was a pretty interesting use case.

5. Are there any particular forces that have shaped your cloud strategy?

Having to deal with legacy infrastructure and the needs to refresh those. Cloud for the first time offers a way to do it cheaper, better, and faster than traditional platforms. The other aspect is around operational costs. We’re consuming significantly more storage. For us, it was going to be a big step for us to internally have to store things. For example, with our email platform, moving to a cloud solution. We were able to avoid buying several million in storage we otherwise would have had to, just to keep pace with the growth of the company.

6. Why would you recommend building on a cloud platform?

The fact that we as salesforce.com, and a lot of the other cloud providers, do multi-releases a year. Because of the cloud architecture, IT departments can immediately adopt those releases and functionality as they are made available. That’s really the beauty of cloud. The speed of innovation and agility is one of those unmeasured, but highly qualitative advantages.

7. Anything IT should beware of when it comes to this kind of development?

Things like architecture, data, and modeling are disciplines IT has atrophied on, but those skillsets are critically important because it is a bit of a new frontier. It’s very easy to do new app development, but if you don’t get your architects out ahead to start defining the data models, and laying down the style guide and guardrails of how you will or won’t integrate across systems, you will quickly end up with a rat's nest that will be really painful to work through in the future. Just because it’s in the cloud doesn’t mean everything that you’ve done as an IT professional gets thrown out the door.