Round Table

Center of Excellence Insights

What is driving the need for a Center Of Excellence?

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All those organizations are always changing the way they’re interacting with the customer. So I think the platform itself requires a set of excellence so that you could keep up with the opportunities that you have to service your customers better constantly.

Lou Fox
CTO / COO

So we’re seeing a lot of pull from clients going, all right, the good news was, it was really easy to develop in Salesforce and the bad news was it’s really easy to develop in Salesforce, and now we need to start applying some organizational discipline around it, otherwise we’re gonna run ourselves into problems.

Jay Noble
SVP Salesforce Practice Leader

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What is a center of excellence

If you break it down, it’s (a CoE) just a simple way of delivering incremental regular change to the business and adding ongoing business value quickly. It’s a way of ensuring that business and IT become one, in steering and governance and they get rid of those historic silos.
Mark HillGlobal CIO
As a leader, you really need to look from the outside in and have an eye on the business. Because it’s less about technology in my opinion, than it is about the business and truly understanding what are the levers that we’re trying to pull.
Leo MinerviniGlobal CIO
Whether you’re a tiny organization or a very large organization, you’re still trying to maximize the return on investment of your spend on Salesforce. I view the center of excellence being the manifestation of, almost a philosophy, which is you are trying to run what you do as well as possible.
Adrian KingCOO / CTO

Elements.cloud underpins the Center of Excellence. 

The platform to power your Center of Excellence

  • Methodology: The implementation lifecycle can be clearly documented, clearly understood and easily accessible as a process map. Mapping the methodology will streamline it, driving out waste, eliminating bottlenecks and breaking down organizational silos.
  • Standards: Attaching documented standards to the related steps in the methodology ensures they can be consistently applied.
  • Governance: Project risks are reduced in 3 areas; a consistently applied methodology, better business analysis of the changes required, and technology impact analysis.
  • Change control: Managing the business requirements, metadata and associated documentation
  • Metadata management: Control of the Salesforce metadata and integrated apps across the deployment pipeline
  • Architecture: ERDs can be drawn as process maps connected to metadata items and technical specifications
  • Change management: Process maps are used as training materials with attached documentation. In-app popup help is inside Salesforce with rating and tracking. Feedback can be captured from end users “in the moment” inside Salesforce.  Training records are created when user sign-off compliant processes.

Why you need a center of excellence

Organizations have all these different business units and they all have Salesforce. They all have autonomy. They make their changes and they live in their little silo. Bringing them together is the biggest challenge.
Jay NobleSVP Salesforce Practice Leader
One of the typical questions that I’ll ask an organization is, do they have a clear and documented Salesforce vision. A high percentage of the time. I get mixed answers around that. The reality is most of the time the answer is no, and then the follow on question to that is, if they do have one, is your management team fully on board with that plan?
Carter WigellCEO
I think a lot of times when you get into IT departments in particular, there’s a thirst and a desire to really show what they can do. Next thing you know, you’ve got an over-engineered Mercedes-Benz when you just needed a Chevy. I think the challenge for us is that when you over-engineer processes, you actually add more complexity which defeats the purpose of speed.
Will AnastasCRO

How to get started

I’m an incredibly data-driven CRO – I thirst for data. I also appreciate what it takes to build and create these systems having come from that environment at Salesforce. So for me, it was just understanding what I had and then strategically looking out at the business and saying, what don’t I have in order for me to make well-informed decisions?

Will Anastas
CRO

In the environment I’m in now, given the scale and the growth, starting with a program management office, essentially driving a framework around how we’re executing against digital transformation and cross-functional initiatives is bar none, extremely urgent. It’s critical to our business. We want to make sure that we’re making the right investments and we’re getting the ROI.

Leo Minervini
Global CIO

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