CIO of successful startups told as it is correct to form IT

Success of development of a startup – a headache of many heads of the companies. It appears, everything is simple: high-quality selection of personnel, reasonable economy of means, participation in activity of developers, following to new technologies, attention to customers and … Before you successful business!

Successful technology startups aim to draw, as a rule, attention to the new products, but not to how they use IT. But some companies as Groupon, Box.net, Zendesk and SlideShare, can help Chief information officers - to learn lessons from own achievements as they began with limited resources, total absence of IT infrastructure, but permanent attention to the latest IT tools and services.

Groupon: integrate information technologies with business strategy

The Groupon company founded in 2008 considers that crucial importance of its success that IT heads set close and permanent cooperation with business managers.

"We try to create very friendly atmosphere of joint work, receiving the Wednesday which is very densely integrated with a business side, - Ivan Moscoso, the director of developments of Groupon company told. – We never have special disagreements between our divisions. We try to provide the impartial environment of exchange of views".

To achieve such effect, Groupon very selectively approaches hiring of IT specialists. It looks for strong candidates in the technical plan who are able to understand business of the company, her requirement and at the same time normally to contact to colleagues not of IT departments. Moskoso is sure: for close cooperation between business and a technical command, it is necessary to select the correct people, how exclusively technical, so open for work with the mixed groups of specialists.

Zendesk: manage cooperation of developers

Zendesk creates web services of the help and a software maintenance, holds internal short-term meetings for application developers. These "five-minutes" help to stimulate the innovation thinking and give the necessary soil for quick implementation of projects.

The company holds short meetings (stand up format) among developers of its applications. They take from 15 to 20 minutes and give the chance to a command to discuss something new and to inform questions which need to be solved. But for real cooperation there are hackathons (hackathon - "party" of programmers is a comment of TAdviser) where developers participate in projects which can be complete within a day, Zack Urlocker, the senior chief executive of Zendesk told. "It is optional to do it permanently, but sometimes it is good method - to implement at once a lot of small projects and to give to people feeling of the fulfilled duty", - he emphasized.

Box.Net: you pass into "cloud" to preserve investments

Box.Net - provider of network content management, applications of joint work and general use of files. Until recently in the company there was only one person whose activity was devoted only to questions IT: he provided support of 150 employees, thanks to the liberal and reasonable application of cloud applicaions and infrastructure services.

Jeff Sutton, the leading expert of the company in the field of IT and until recently - the only IT employee, noted: "I work on such questions on which would never work, we do not have this cloud infrastructure. I constantly would carry out the same tasks in service". The company just employed the second IT specialist.

Sutton, for example, is responsible for the internal application development environment of the company and the project of VMware. However, according to him, he could make even much more.

Speaking about safety of application of cloud applicaions and alarm in this respect of IT heads, Urloker considers that providers of "clouds" considerably improved their security, reliability and performance. "They really developed in recent years. It is the any more Wild West", - he added. According to him, Chief information officers can find out that reliability and safety which to them is ensured the supplier of commercial "clouds" often exceeds that level which they have in own departments of IT.

Urloker recommends to begin slowly and with small. "The companies should begin and take several steps in this direction, to try several projects, - he told. - If you have an IT organization which does not use any software on a cloud basis, it actually – beyond".

SlideShare: software as production development

SlideShare is the website for placement and exchange of the presentations, business-related, brought art of permanent fine tuning of the software to perfection and issues several innovations in day, based on the permanent and comprehensive analysis of behavior of users.

The technical director and the co-owner of SlideShare Jonathan Boutelle recommends approach of permanent iteration in the software development based on the careful analysis of behavior of users. "When you cut work as rather small shares, its volume not so frightens", - he told.

This approach is much less risky, than normal philosophy of maintaining six-months or even larger IT project, and then, one day its deployments in full, in a manner of "Big Bang", Bautel considers.