COVID19 forcing change at Lightning pace

Speed and relevance are the most important currencies during a crisis. That means adapting quickly and leveraging technology.

Industry leaders have identified 3 phases that all organizations are going to go through: Stabilize, Reopen, Grow. Organizations are currently adapting in the  phase, which is about reacting to crisis. Forward thinking leaders are digitally transforming their businesses to be effective in the Grow phase. This is due to a change in customer expectations and the markets. COVID-19 has accelerated this agenda. Salesforce will be at the heart of these transformations as they will be centered on a 360 degree view of the customer.

It is unlikely that there will be a “back to normal” scenario. Without a clear playbook, organizations will need to be agile so they can quickly optimize their business models (people, process and technology) in response to very dynamic conditions. However, this needs to be both robust and sustainable with a level of governance.

Many organizations are unprepared for the pace of change that will be required. High levels of technical debt, long Salesforce implementation release cycles and low adoption rates have blunted the agility of organizations. Even the largest and most mature Salesforce customers say they do not have a platform that provides centralized documentation and impact assessment to allow them to make Salesforce Org changes at pace. Without it they suffer from an increased level of technical, business and governance (regulatory) risk. They are not exploiting the power of Salesforce.

The Salesforce implementation lifecycle needs (itself) to be digitally transformed. There should be a natural flow of documentation along the lifecycle. Every phase uses documentation from earlier phases. Currently, vital time and information is lost transferring from document to spreadsheet to app and then back to document. There is no reuse of information, in context. The power of the Salesforce metadata APIs is not exploited. There is no impact analysis enabling changes to be accelerated based on risk. There is no traceability or governance.

It does not have to be this way..

The Salesforce Org should become more valuable with age – rather like fine wine or classic sports cars. It should get incrementally better every hour, every day, every release.

What is required is a centralized platform designed to support rapid business change and Salesforce releases. It coordinates the development and reuse of all documentation around the lifecycle and provides power risk analysis to support accelerated change.

The overall benefits of digital transformation are unequivocal, and organizations that can respond quickly in the Grow phase will ultimately emerge as the overall winners. The tactical benefits of using a centralized platform to drive more rapid and controlled change release cycles can be as high as 25% process improvement savings, 80% reduction in impact assessment effort and 20% increased user adoption All of these underpin and accelerate the digital transformation agenda which is the far larger prize. So, there is an immediate return, that will keep paying back long after we have forgotten COVID-19.

Elements.cloud has been designed as a platform to accelerate digital transformation that can scale to the largest organizations worldwide. It can support such rapid pace of change, with confidence and governance. It is tightly integrated into Salesforce and is based on 20+ years of proven projects in Fortune 500 companies.

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