Lisa (Georgetown) – The connected campus. Universities need to create 1:1 experiences, personalized to them. So do faculty and alumni. Students expect universities to know them. Do you know I’m on campus? We have data but it’s siloed. How do we reuse data in different contexts? What is the likelihood of student x with professor y for a course giving back to the university as an alum? Unifying data is what they’re trying to do so they can leverage it.
Salesforce can unify and connect data across the student lifecycle. Right now Salesforce does not do all the functions needed for advancement, but they are partnering with Blackbaud to build that out.
Connected campus: use cases – how do we use data to make better decisions, connect with people,.
Am I getting what I am paying for? Getting that question a lot. What is the ROI? Where is that data coming from? Advancement saw that they were missing data that others had that they could use for their work.
Challenges and Opportunities: Central IT can be the aggregator and integrator to achieve a unified data model. Leading and lifting CRM up out of localized, point solutions into an enterprise model: enabling school specific branding and innovation; breaking down the silos. Strategic timing – leveraging innovation in schools without getting out of synch; funding the next significant application domain.
Build heat map of where Salesforce is being used on campus, connecting the dots. Funding is a challenge, trying to create momentum.
Pressuring Salesforce for making their pricing more fitting to higher ed.
Data challenges at Georgetwon – data slipping through the cracks. Eg. communication preferences, first year roommate, course collaborations, # of visits to advisor, challenges, even attendance, survey data, study habits, favorite faculty, personal wellness, engagement with faculty, current interests, etc. There’s some discussion in the room about whether the use of data collected in transactional settings for other purposes is appropriate or not. Existing data policies are inadequate for expressing the contexts in which data can be combined and reused. There’s a huge “black market” in data already happening among campus units.
Salesforce@Georgetown – Goal is to seamlessly integrate data environments into one experience. Data collected from departmental spreadsheets and forms, departmental solutions, enterprise reporting, and two way flows to enterprise business applications. Moved a lot of cold fusion solutions into force.com.
One of the differentiators for Salesforce is a very intuitive UI for people working with the data. Takes away the need to pull data into Excel and do pivot tables, etc. Salesforce has granular security models.
Why use a CRM rather than dashboard reporting from the Data Warehouse? The data warehouse aggregated the four primary data sources into one place. There’s a difference between enterprise reporting and Salesforce daily and transactional reporting. Salesforce not good at longitudinal reporting. Dashboards and enterprise reporting answer larger and longer-based questions, but schools are using Salesforce to deal with current questions and problems – how is the response to this event?
Need to create some data rulesets before customizing objects and processes. GU hopes to be able to put a high level set of standards about that.
Bob Carozzoni – Cornell: Re-positioning enterpris IT’s role in CRM
Not doing typical enterprise IT model of owning the vendor relationship and acting as a reseller. Acting on the side as an advisor. The space is too fluid to take ownership. Consultant recommended consolidation of CRM tools, but CRM project closed without campus agreement on consolidation. Cloud activity allowing consumers to go directly to companies, and in activities like CRM there’s nothing forcing people to work together. What can IT add to CRM? With ERP the drive is to spend less, because it’s not differentiating. CRM is part of how you differentiate your brand and build business value, so it might make sense to spend more. Do business leaders have a strategy? Does IT? It’s not just higher ed – most social and CRM activities in companies are not being led by IT.
Taking a soft organic approach which got campus talking to IT. Gentle engagements – contracts, distributed free MS Dynamics licenses, interviewed units and published results. Doing facilitation getting units to talk to each other – organized a Salesforce user group, but IT doesn’t lead it. Shine spotlight on campus leaders. Encouraged PaaS for CRM instead of just point solutions.
Enterprise IT funded a small architecture assessment to create some guidance documentation.
Shel – the current trend is the growth of small applets that get bolted on to cloud platforms as micro applications. In the future the lock-in may be to the bolt-ons more than the core application.
Andy Newman – Yale: Value proposition of Salesforce & Force.com at Yale
Problem: had a large number of one-off applications with enterprise data. Had two ways to address it – provide lightweight environmental a low cost (e.g. Filemaker). Requires local knowledge, and degrades over time; or sit down with BAs and build a custom app. Time consuming and expensive, hard to iterate.
Looked at using Salesforce for rapid development of inexpensive customized apps. Performance, reliability, availability are someone else’s problem. Zero capital footprint.
Early explorations – totally custom small footprint app; tailored sales/service (CRM-ish) business need. The rise of the “citizen developer”.
Should optimizing subscription costs unduly influence application design and architecture?
Are we ok with “citizen data architects”? with institutional data?
About a year ago started to get serious. Hired Bluewolf to help mature environment. Recommendations for “Org” structure. IT wrote recommendations for development platforms (use the technology that the anchor product uses or use the technology that the anchor product recommends… so with Workday that would be ???). Decided that force.com would be the development environment for Workday.
Analysis – Examining three models – Pure configuration of service desk or CRM app; greenfield force.com application; hybrid model – professional engineer partners with citizen developer. Need case studies for hybrid model.
What’s the role of central IT? Traditionally business data stewards partner with IT in standing up technical access to data – there might be an analogous process in Salesforce with a common core org with institutional data to feed to satellite orbs. Each satellite supports applications common to a constituent group.
What about Workday? Is force.com ultimately the extension platform for Workday? Workday’s vision is the cloud dominated as workday for ERP, Salesforce for CRM, Service Now, and Google, Microsoft, etc, with APIs for interop.
Georgetown – Beyond CRM: Platform VS application
Salesforce – not your grandmother’s CRM – engagement platform beyond traditional CRM: integrates and collects data at multiple touch points not just one transactional domain; engages the target and expanded functionality to them – mobile collaborative and cool; goes beyond CRM with workflow/triggers/reporting/DB.
Force.com – build bridge apps to stay aligned with ERP roadmaps: Workday – tuition benefits example (intent not to keep forever once workday makes functionality available); Address the “gap” and reduce proliferation of point solutions apps: student housing selection (future); Difference in experience is not just in reducing length and complexity, but UI and reporting were right through reuse of standard UI dashboards and objects. Emergent database/workflow/reporting needs; reduce security risks via visibility.
App Exchange – community and commercial market place; broad range of app capabilities, plug and play; speed to launch, easy integration, scalable. Is this the new direction for innovation and cohesive services? Admissions apps would be a natural to develop in Salesforce.
Imagine a triangle with Identity and data management at one point, CRM at another, and enterprise data warehouse and reporting at the other. There’s a disconnect with the organic growth of Salesforce and how the connections to enterprise data are managed.
Oren Sreebny 