Trulia, a Zillow Group brand, is a premiere provider of online real estate information. On one side, the platform gives consumers info around for sale and rental listings, such as what’s available and neighborhood schools. On the other side, Trulia offers tools for real estate agents to manage their business and develop new leads. Dorian Kendal, Trulia’s VP, Enterprise Applications and IT, and his team of 30, enable 1100 employees with what they need for their job, from laptops, to their Salesforce instance. As the latest subject of our “IT Visionaries” series, Kendal shares his philosophy on “build vs. buy,” why marketing should be part of IT’s job, and his latest custom app projects.

1. Has the New Year brought a new focus for your department?

The goal this year is to build upon what we started in 2014; bringing our company together as one from an infrastructure and enterprise systems standpoint. The idea is to take what we have now that we're all on Salesforce and just make it incredible. For example, we have our own internal order management system. We want to better connect it with Salesforce so we can pump more info between both systems. From a lead-routing standpoint, it's about implementing better scoring programs and routing leads more efficiently based on their urgency and priority.
 

2. Is custom application development part of this strategy?

Absolutely. Using Force.com, we built a connector between Dashboard, a shopping tool our sales reps use to quote customers, and our Salesforce accounts. They can see in map format what zip codes they're working on and which are close by with relevant inventory information. It’s great especially if a customer’s first choice neighborhood may have sold out. Originally, the two weren’t connected, so it was a friction heavy process that would take reps 10 to 15 minutes on a per-lead basis if a prospect came into our Salesforce and did not have an account already in our customer database. From an ROI perspective we’ve been able to reclaim a lot of the leads that were being dispositioned because of the process being so rough.

And then with our media business, billing had been a nightmare. There were black holes everywhere. Using a partner, Celigo, we did a full integration of NetSuite with Salesforce, plus DoubleClick on our side. Every step, from the first customer contact, to invoices being created, is connected. We manage our compliance in there. Our legal team does approvals. Our accounting team does credit checks. It has been an incredible example of what you can do if you connect the right things in the right way. It used to take four people, eight long days to issue invoices monthly. Now it takes three people, two days. Our booking to billing rate has increased roughly from 65 to 90 percent. It is arguably the most successful project I've ever done.

3. You’ve consulted at some of the most innovative companies out there, including Facebook and Google. Is there a take away you can share?

Each of those environments has different perspectives on “We have all this engineering talent. Should we build stuff in house or is there a vendor that can actually meet our needs?” Walking out of those experiences and into Trulia, where I also consulted at first, informed a lot of my philosophy on making smart decisions around what enterprise cloud solutions our department should build, versus what we should buy. I always say, why would we build something when another company is investing $50 million a year into making the exact same thing better?
 

4. What has been the big challenge for you working in today’s cloud app environment?

Before it was very easy to build a walled garden around your IT organization to ensure things were being tested and reviewed. It's a lot harder to do these days because, especially in a high-tech company like Trulia, we have so many engineers and talented technical people who really baulk at any limitations to going out and trying things. The challenge that I find is building an IT organization where people want to come to you for perspective and feedback prior to actually signing up for apps, rather than running forward and asking for forgiveness later.

5. How do you balance that point of you with still giving them options?

We have an internal file share no one uses. Instead, hundreds of people use an external service. It has no oversight by the company, no administrative control. The IT sort of knee jerk reaction is, "We need to shut this down somehow to get everyone into our internal thing.” But that's really sort of an archaic perspective. With my team, I said, "Listen, if these people are all using this one thing and they love it, they're doing it for a reason.” It serves as even more evidence for our IT organization to make a move to enable employees to use what they enjoy, while still being able to get our own comfort around security, privacy, and governance.

6. Why is marketing a big part of what you do?

People don't get excited about plumbing. The first thing we do for projects we believe are important, but the Business might not consider super instrumental, is to market them, so that people outside of our team will get excited, interested, and involved. When we are arguing for something like a new building solution, we talk about how it will enable the company and what the revenue impact will be. We don’t say, “Here’s another piece of infrastructure.”

7. Any other advice for pulling off a successful IT project?

From my experience, when projects really go awry it’s because success wasn’t defined at the outset. Then you look back a month later and wonder how you got there. It’s because you didn’t have clear goals and objectives. We use a discovery doc we fill in with the Business that really focuses on the problem we are trying to solve and how we measure it was successful once the project is completed. Otherwise projects can end up taking any number of different paths.

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