OREANDA-NEWS. October 21, 2015. There’s a mandate facing IT leaders of today: Innovate or be left behind. However, this new directive doesn’t have to be a negative. It means there is an exciting opportunity for CIOs and others to make a tremendous impact by introducing technology that moves their department and broader organization forward.

With this in mind, we sat down with a dozen IT visionaries, across industries, to discuss the obstacles they’ve faced as a result of the pressure to innovate and how they are meeting these challenges. Among the topics covered: working with the Business, how to build apps fast, meeting user expectations, and connecting data to the right people in real time.   

Check out highlights of what was shared below and to read more, be sure to download the free e-book, Leading the IT Revolution: How 12 IT Visionaries are transforming their organizations with Salesforce.

Taking a Business-First IT Mindset

“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 that we test in our Salesforce sandboxes.” - Sheri Rhodes, VP of IT Global Applications, Symantec

“The more successful we can make employees, the more successful they’re going to make our customers and partners. If you look at the feedback from our customers, I think it’s working,” - Craig Butler, VP of Information Systems, Workday

Building and Iterating on Apps Frequently

“IT will 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.” - Pradip Sitaram, SVP and CIO, Enterprise Community Partners

“Salesforce has helped us become a more agile company. Developers can build a proof-of-concept in a day or two and get immediate feedback and faster iteration.” - Mike Anderson, CIO, CROSSMARK

Focusing on the User Experience

“Technology is changing very fast. IT needs to get ahead of the curve or it will become obsolete. Everything is moving to the cloud. But which cloud platform you choose makes a significant difference.” - Paul Risk, Chief of Global Applications and Architecture, The Warranty Group

“With Salesforce, we have the most efficient and scalable cloud platform. It means our focus is on serving our clients, not building servers and managing infrastructure.” - Antoine de Kerviler, CIO, Eurostar

Putting the Right Data in the Right Hands

“[With App Cloud] we were able to seamlessly integrate all of our back-office data from Oracle ERP. This allows for consistency and accuracy across the board, because when the data gets updated in one location, it gets updated everywhere.” - Mark Brewer, SVP and CIO, Seagate

“I think people in IT are scared sometimes. Everyone wants to release a perfect product. But it’s more important to get it out there, take the feedback, and run with that, than try and aim for perfection from day one.” - David Baker, VP of IT, St. Joseph Health

Learn much more from these transformative leaders by downloading this free e-book.