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Whether you’re just transitioning to a leadership role in your career or have years of leadership experience under your belt — there’s always something new to learn from innovative peers. We asked IT leaders across industries what advice they would give to other IT leaders. Hear what advice MuleSoft customers — the State of Indiana, Department of Child Services, Land O’Lakes, and United States Department of Agriculture had to offer!

1. State of Indiana, Department of Child Services 

“My biggest piece of advice for other IT leaders is to be water. Being water can be as impactful to your ecosystem as a tidal wave crashing on land, and be as lifesaving as an oasis in the middle of the Sahara desert. The value of water is it sustains almost all life on our planet. Being water in your organization sustains the life of innovation and collaboration, and allows you to take the form of the solution that your organization needs, and not dictate what your organization does and/or limit what your organization does. In my mind, water-based technology like MuleSoft, which enables you to have the flexibility to form any solution as the world around you changes, and respond appropriately just like water does. Whether it needs transformation that requires the tidal wave, or if it just needs to save a life like an oasis does. Be water.”

Kevin Jones, CIO, State of Indiana Department of Child Services 

2. Land O’Lakes 

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“The biggest piece of advice that I have learned is making sure that you have a good platform architecture. Starting out a new platform is always going to be a little scary to begin with but identifying the key architects is monumental. Learn from the MuleSoft team and bring in external help with the right architecture so you can properly train your team members. Enablement is key for the initial phase which will build out the foundation and lay out the strategy. Another piece is making sure you have your infrastructure and network teams engaged. They’re critical to this success. The third piece of advice is to make sure your business partners are aligned on your strategy and you’re delivering the needs of the business to make a more agile and standard system.” 

Sampath Kumar, Sr. IT Manager, Land O’Lakes

3. United States Department of Agriculture 

“Seeing how we could do things better within the organization and how we could reproduce that as successes for other efforts, really just having the willingness to kind of lean forward a little bit into new technologies and new capabilities, as well as, kind of break that paradigm that a lot of folks get into is, “We’ve always done it this way. This is the way we should do it.” That’s always, to me, a good reason why you should do it differently.” 

Casey Cook, Cloud Architecture Branch Chief, United States Department of Agriculture

To hear more from our customers, download our white paper 5 industry leaders who redefined speed and agility.