Salesforce Simplified: Why every Salesforce Org needs a Center of Excellence

Customers of all sizes are struggling with levels of technical debt that are killing agility. This is (at least in part) due to the low levels of implementation maturity compared with the general IT industry. The good news is that these are “solved problems” in other ecosystems where the implementation maturity is much higher.

All research and experience points to the importance of implementing a Center of Excellence.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Derek Cassese

Transcript

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Andy Whiteside: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Episode 5 of salesforce simplified. I'm your host, Andy White Side today is February seventh, 2024 I'll hit you guys with my commercial real quick if you're a salesforce customer and there are a ton of them and you're not getting the value out of the platform that you should be. Well, it's not because of the platform. It's because you're not getting the right assistance, and that's why, as integral has invested in building out salesforce practice. And Derek Cassis.

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formerly of Salesforce, is running that practice. Derek's with me, Derek. How's it going?

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Andy Whiteside: It's going well, going real good, have you? Have you had a chance to help a customer this week with sales?

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Derek Cassese: Give me an example of what their problem was and and what you did for it's a it's a current project. But you know, like any we're, it's actually related to what we're gonna talk about today. But with any project, you've gotta do impact analysis. And we're helping them really understand all the pieces and puzz pieces of their org that are related

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Derek Cassese: to a single field on the opportunity.

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And, you know, giving getting customers, insights, and showing them how to find things, etc.

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Derek Cassese:  you know, just is really something that it's. It's fun for me to help people feel better when they're like, Oh, I get it. Now, you know, that's it's a. It's a cool feeling to make sure that we're helping people like that. You know, the the platform makes sense. It's just helping people make sense of the platform that makes sense. Yes, it is.

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Derek Cassese: Yep, yep, there's there's a lot of situations where you know you're that you've heard it before, but they don't know what they don't know, but it's it's very true

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Derek Cassese: in the world of salesforce in that there's so much to know that it's almost impossible to know what to ask sometimes. Yes. Well, that's why the partnership matters. That's why you've gotta have.

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Andy Whiteside: you know, relationship with the vendor. In this case, salesforce relationship with a value added reseller partner manage service provider support organization. And then the customer needs to be treated like they're, you know, part of that equation equally as part of that equation, in fact, probably elevated in that conversation the the blog you brought forward today. I have no idea what this is about. So why, every salesforce org, every salesforce organization

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Andy Whiteside: needs a center of excellence. This is by Ian Gott from November of 2020. I'm assuming that even though it's, you know, 4 years old, 3 years old at this point, 3 4 years old 3 years old. That the the relevance is still just as important. I'll I'll just start with the very first line and then let you run with it. The summary starts, which is interesting summaries in the beginning salesforce was a forward focus. Now it's an Aston Martin gte race car. help me make sense of that. And and which one of those do customers need?

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Derek Cassese: Yeah, so this is I. I'm really intrigued by this whole concept here, and it is

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Derek Cassese: a 2020 article. But it is even more relevant today, in my opinion, probably, than it was back in 2020.  so the idea behind this, in the summary section of this.

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Derek Cassese: It's a it's like a summary. And then there a summary of another article that we'll get to. So there's like a couple of summaries here. But what we're saying is that back in the day when Salesforce started.

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Derek Cassese: it was a very tactical app for automating salesforce like like a salesforce automation app right, and

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Derek Cassese: it has grown to what we know now as a customer experience platform that is

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Derek Cassese: strategic across an organization. Right? So you you go from a tactical.

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Derek Cassese: you know. Very like point A to point B to something with all kinds of bells and whistles that do way. More than just a tactical solution, you know, point solution

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Derek Cassese: with customers spending, you know, upwards of 20 million dollars a year on this thing, which is the forward focus to Aston Martin Gte race car analogy right?

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Derek Cassese: Do you find situations where people are paying for an ass, and Martin Racecar, or nasty Martin in general, and they are getting the performance of a Ford focus. Well.

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Derek Cassese: yeah. And that's that's part that's part of kind of what we're going to talk about in this article. And it's it's ironic.

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Derek Cassese: because for the reasons that a lot of customers get into salesforce

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Derek Cassese: and the success of salesforce is actually the reason why

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Derek Cassese: customers are experiencing issues and pain and struggling to innovate and add things to their environment, etc. So

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Derek Cassese: so we'll get into. So let's get into that. So the summary is basically just kind of drawing that analogy that we've come a long way. You know, they've got the whole ecosystem of trailblazers that are, you know, learning the whole platform on Trail Head. And you know they're they're they're

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Derek Cassese: they're implementing, you know, implementing really interesting things and etc. But we've gotten to a point where, because it's so strategic. The

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Derek Cassese: the penalty of it failing is significant, right? It's not just a tactical point solution. Now, that doesn't work for somebody in the corner off for somewhere. It's you know.

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Derek Cassese: you're losing revenue. You're not able to take orders. You're not able to close deals. It's it's extremely impactful

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Derek Cassese: so we've got. I have. It's every single org I've ever gone into.

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Derek Cassese:  I've seen this

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Derek Cassese: technical debt, and what I mean by that technical debt of just

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Derek Cassese: old ways of implementing things, maybe prior to salesforce, coming out with a standard way of doing something

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Derek Cassese: or legacy, managed packages that are no longer being used, or maybe an old manage. An old app exchange app that was purchased before a solution was built.

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Derek Cassese: or custom flows that do 400 things when an opportunity is saved. is inhibiting customers from actually

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Derek Cassese: innovating and doing more with the platform.

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Because you know that if you touch that deck of cards

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Derek Cassese: it's going to potentially fall. Does that make sense? No, it does. And

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Andy Whiteside: you know, people probably know that store. In fact, recently, they they know that's their organization.

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Derek Cassese: And they know they got to do something to fix it before it gets worse. Yeah. And so what this article is really trying to paint a picture of those that this is a.

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Derek Cassese: It's a solved problem in other, in, in other ecosystems. Right? So it's not like a unique situation.

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Derek Cassese: so it's solved in ecosystems where the implementation is more mature.

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Derek Cassese: We're just at that tipping point right now, where orgs are starting to get crazy like just the number of custom objects, the number of fields, reports.

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you know, process builders that need to be moved to flow and flows that are doing all kinds of stuff that are custom.

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Derek Cassese: It's just getting to a point where the success of the platform has gotten you where you are. But now you're at a point where it takes forever to make a change.

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Derek Cassese: Right? So now that whole reason you bought in the platform because it's fast and agile and quick, and you can do. All kinds of stuff is now evaporating right? And that's what this that's what we're talking about. Here is one of the solutions

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Derek Cassese: is to adopt the concept of a center of excellence. There's others. There's other ways of approaching it. But that's what this, that's what this article is discussing. And the whole concept you scroll down

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Derek Cassese: when we get into, like, you know, growing pains that the authors basically describing their initial use of salesforce, and how it was easy. And they built, you know, they had 285 custom objects. They ran all aspects of their of their organization.

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Derek Cassese: It was their core platform, and everything was fine. It it it was the early days in 2,001, and things were just working.

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Derek Cassese: And 20 years later.

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Derek Cassese: It's got a lot more moving pieces, and it's just much more difficult if you've got

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Derek Cassese: a mature org to add and change and make make updates. Right?

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Derek Cassese: So we talk about warning signs. If you scroll down, it's this is where we talk about the forrester report. So anybody listening to this podcast might be aware, or may have read

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Derek Cassese: back in 2,017, Forster wrote an article called Salesforce at scale, dilemma.

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Derek Cassese: And I came about this topic in a in a video that I was watching from

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Derek Cassese: a partner called Elements Cloud, which I'll get into at some point later in this podcast where they referenced this this article of salesforce at scale dilemma.

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Derek Cassese: and what it is it is. It's it's what I've been talking about, right? So you love, you love, salesforce, you, buy it. You love how it's extremely productive. You can develop your own stuff

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Derek Cassese: the initial success breaks. Demand for more. Right? You add more departments? Say, oh, I wanna do this. I wanna do commissions out of it. I wanna do invoicing out of it. I wanna do quoting. I wanna add other aspects to it.

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Derek Cassese: Okay, now new custom apps come in. New custom. Objects come in, new custom. Fields come in right, and the complexity and scale increases.

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Derek Cassese: but yet crushes the responsiveness

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Derek Cassese: of the environment. Right? So as it grows, the innovation slows and the flexibility completely evaporates.

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Derek Cassese: Next to dilemma, right that forest or published back in 2017. That's what this author is discussing in that there is a way to address this and has to start. We have to start addressing this now. And why I wanna talk about it is because I feel like as a as a salesforce partner when I go in, and I'm looking at a customer's environment.

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Derek Cassese: And I see all of this technical debt. And I see process builders that aren't moved, and I see

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Derek Cassese: no consistency in any way, shape or form on naming conventions. And just it's it's just kind of all over the place I can. I know immediately

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Derek Cassese: where they're heading, and it's not a good place, because it's gonna get to a point where they're either they're gonna do. And this is discussed down further. But they're gonna one of one of 3 things are gonna happen. They're either gonna have to.

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Derek Cassese: They're they're either gonna basically lose all Roi on the whole platform because it's just gonna be. They're gonna be standing still. They're not gonna be able to add anything to it.

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Derek Cassese: and that will lead to either a large cleanup project or a brand new org, where they'll have to just move everything to, or they'll just jump ship completely and blame the platform right, but that we all know that's not the issue.

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It's just. There are so many levers.

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Derek Cassese: you know, so many Lego blocks, if you will, that you've gotten yourself kind of in a corner, right? So

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Derek Cassese: the the Forrester report kind of goes through. And I'm I'm not gonna read it word for word. But you know, as you get to a point where. and you and you know they listed there right? It becomes a responsive, costly cleanup project. It just launched. The org is thrown away, replaced by a new order, a different platform. Right now check this out. This is what I thought was really interesting.

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Derek Cassese: So they analyzed 1 billion or metadata items. So if you're not familiar, you know, salesforce, the metadata salesforce is split between your data and the metadata.

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Derek Cassese: and that's how it's so powerful. The metadata. It. It describes the configuration of your salesforce work.

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Derek Cassese: And so

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they looked at the metadata, not the actual data, but they looked at the metadata of these orgs, and they found

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Derek Cassese: that this technical debt is at like crippling level. So a couple of orgs had 2, 250,000 reports, 5 50,000 email templates.

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Derek Cassese: Somebody had 400 record types.

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Derek Cassese: There was one. Okay, here's the one 100 manage packages installed into work, 18 million cases.

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Andy Whiteside: and then they got to one where the An org had 10 million task records, and they were like, that's insane. But then the next week they found one with 114 million task records. And and Derek, these are probably organizations that have a full time salesforce administrator, and and they think they're doing the right thing because they're just off creating and creating and creating. And really, they're creating a mess.

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Yeah, it's it's

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Derek Cassese: you do what you do right. So you're comfortable. It's not really quote unquote, broken.

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Derek Cassese: But you can't add you're you're just not able to add things right. You may be afraid to change a formula field like up like right now, right? We just recently got an update from salesforce for 3 times a year. One of the updates is the ability to use the dynamic forms on an object

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Derek Cassese: of related objects. What does that mean? That means that I can actually pull in a field from the opportunity

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onto an account page.

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Derek Cassese: So now II can get rid of all my formula fields that used to do that.

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Derek Cassese: But those formula fields are probably in a gazillion reports, and those formula fields are probably used in flows. So now you want to use this new innovation salesforce. But you can't, because you'd break 400 things. So you've you've got this situation where you've got to trying to slow down, back up and figure out how to address situation

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Derek Cassese: right? And so now.

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Derek Cassese: conversation kind of flips. Right? What do you do? Right? You know you're in the situation like, what are we gonna do? And that's where the author kinda

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Derek Cassese: goes. Goes along kind of with an analogy of a of an Aston Martin Gt. Racecar team. Right? It takes this entire team to win a race like there's a there's tons of people involved

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Derek Cassese: to a, and each one of them is specialized in certain areas. And and so that's where we get into the concept of

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Derek Cassese: a center of excellence. Right? So it's the it's and that's been around right. And people listening to. So product, you know, some maybe rolling their eyes. Now, here we go, another team and other group. Sure, I mean, there are some negative connotations around coes. There are some very positive things around center of excellence.

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Derek Cassese: the the characteristics of a

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Derek Cassese: but a good center of excellence. And they talk about it in this article right is got best leadership got sponsors.

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Derek Cassese: You know, the best tools.

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Derek Cassese: and they they kind of go back and forth right? So the leadership CIO Crm owner, the best sponsors would be budget and investment.

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Derek Cassese: The best tools, right? Would be business analyst devops, organic analytics, change management, all that in place. So you're not just creating things on the fly.

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And then.

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Derek Cassese: you know, the best team qualified project managers. Again, business analyst architects, admins developers, change managers. And that's where

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the team right there. That's where I think partners can play a much bigger role, is helping customers

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Derek Cassese: wrap their minds around. What does this look like, and it doesn't have to be all in house people on these teams, right? And maybe it's better if it's not because you're not, you know you're coming at it with a different mindset to try to say, Okay.

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Derek Cassese: what do you actually, what are you trying to accomplish? What is the end goal? And maybe there's a much better way to accomplish that in your org rather than

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adding more technical debt, adding more custom, code, adding custom apex, whatever it is that you were going to do

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Derek Cassese: that is adding to that technical death that cause that makes it so hard to be

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Andy Whiteside: to be agile and add innovation and innovative pieces to this thing. Right? I think it'd be fair to have one line to this. It says a third party that brings whatever you didn't have to this equation

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Andy Whiteside: absolutely. Yeah. And it could be your organization. You're missing 3 or 4. These third party needs to bring that and let's say you're a larger organization. You have all this. But third party still needs to bring something to the mix, because you can't have it all covered. If you do, you have it, you know, from a a very myopic view of it, that third party should bring in subject matter expertise just by experience.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah, it it really what it is, I mean. And you can do a search. You do a search salesforce you. What? You're gonna find a bunch of stuff. I mean, there's trail heads on it. There's all kinds of information around this concept, right? And at the end of the day, really, what we're trying to do is

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Derek Cassese: not make decisions, a vacuum.

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Derek Cassese: We're not. And we don't wanna be making decisions in the vacuum. But we also don't want to make

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like

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Derek Cassese: org wide changes for tactical reasons that could impact the rest of the organization. So you have to have that you, you know, you have to have all the piece, all the all the stake stakeholders at the table. Everybody has to be aware of what's being done, so that it's in unison.

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Andy Whiteside: so that it's a finely tuned machine, right? Just like the call. Right? You got like the guys and the engine needs to work with the guys in the aerodynamic team and the like, all the tires, all that sent us to work together. It's not gonna work, I bet most organizations just like in the article here. They they just think they got hire the best driver, and then take their eyes off of it, and it will magically be what they expected it to be.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. yeah. And it's I mean, it is true, too. I mean, it's come. II think this product has come so far

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Derek Cassese: that there there may still be some people that feel like, Hey, you know, we can set it up, and, you know, make it do what we needed to do, and we're good to go.

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But then that leads to it is good to go. Let's add this, okay, that's work. And let's add this, and then they're going to be exactly where everybody else is in 2 years. Right?

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Andy Whiteside: Yep.

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So the Coe, you know, E, again, what they're talking about is that this is a solved problem. It's happened, I believe, you know, in in the oracle world this Ap. World like this, this is a situation that has been solved.

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Derek Cassese: and

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Derek Cassese: in the analysis of corporations that have deployed a concept of a Coe.

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Derek Cassese: They're much more successful with with getting rid of the technical debt, with

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Derek Cassese: keeping

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Derek Cassese: keeping it from going off the rails, if you will.

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Derek Cassese: and I think it's it's hard, because it's you know everybody's busy with day to day. Right? You're you're focused on whatever it is that your business is doing. You're focused on

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Derek Cassese: you know.

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Derek Cassese: bringing in revenue or achieving your goals. And it's like this is an extra piece, right? And so it's like it's, it's, it seems like overhead. But it's something that.

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Derek Cassese: in my opinion, needs to start happening in in these in these environments, or unfortunately, it's it's gonna be too difficult to untangle these these orgs where you're just you're just gonna have to do one of those 3 things really gonna have to just jump ship and start a new org, which is just a daunt. I mean that that's almost impossible. And this is also, by the way, somebody listening. If you're still on classic, this is why you're on classic. If you're not on lightning like the reason you're not is because something will break

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Derek Cassese: and you're stuck there. And that's exactly what we're talking about. You're gonna be stuck in a in a point in time at some point, because you've got too much technical debt.

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Derek Cassese: And so I'm just gonna plug right now that there are like, so z integral right salesforce partner, we are here to educate customers. It's not just, hey! Tell me what you wanna do, Mr. Customer, and let me make money on a project it's to educate on what could happen and what may happen, and why you should do something, and why it makes sense not to do something. And I think that partnering to play a bigger role in

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Derek Cassese: bringing the awareness to these things to customers. So, Derek, when you do one of your free micro assessments, we do here these types of concepts come up and you point out the ugly in their in their board. I do. And I actually, gonna I'm going to

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Derek Cassese: mentioned elements cloud here, real quick. Because so there are tools out there to help discover some of this right? Like, I've been mentioning technical dead a lot. And I've been using a tool that allows me, because it would be nearly impossible for one person or team of people to just sift through the metadata and and in a reasonable amount of time.

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Derek Cassese: and understand what we're looking at. So there are tools that can go do that for us, and one of which is it's cloud, like I told you. And I'm using that to

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Derek Cassese: to basically create reports and

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Derek Cassese: visually show customers what we're talking about. Right? 1 1. One area that I thought was pretty interesting was fault coverage, and flows. So anybody that's written a flow? Have you actually created a fault? Path? What is a fault path. It's a path where, if something. So if there's an error, it knows. Okay, go do these things instead of just blowing up. And the majority of

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Derek Cassese: the ors I've seen has very low fall coverage, if any at all. And that's just 1 one piece right?

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Derek Cassese: So yeah, so that's like when I do the micro assessment.

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Derek Cassese: I'm gonna and I'm probably giving away too much from my micro assessment. But I don't really care, because I this is. This is so important to the sustainability of successful salesforce deployment in my opinion that

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Derek Cassese: I can't not tell them right. I can't. I can't like look at an org and see these things and not bring it up. So that's why I'm like, I'm just gonna show all of this. And then we're we're you know what what you can do is I mean because nobody's. I don't think it's realistic to think that you could just have a conversation that a customer is. Gonna alright, let's start a CEO. That's a that's a much larger organizational, wide discussion.

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Derek Cassese: So what are some of the things you can do before that. Well, one of them is obviously, you know, get a micro assessment. Get somebody else outside the organization to look at what you're doing, because.

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Derek Cassese: you know. I remember as a programmer I'd be stuck on something. I couldn't figure out how to make something work, and I'd stare at it for days and have, and I don't know if this ever happened that you. You get away from it for like a week, and you sit back down, and you look, and you immediately see the problem.

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Derek Cassese: And it's just because you're you're too accustomed to it to see the right. And that's why I think it's important to have third party partners like integra or the partners you're working with.

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Derek Cassese: Be a part of this. Be a part of this to try to help clean this stuff up, bringing the awareness to it. It's not gonna happen overnight. but it can start right now, even if just ran raining in like how reports are handled and making sure you don't have reports, sprawl

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Derek Cassese: and put in descriptions and custom fields, so that somebody coming in knows what a field is actually doing and what it's for.

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Derek Cassese: I mean, nobody put that. I think it's very rare to think that anybody's putting a nice, real description in a field. It's not happening. And it's because it takes what another

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Derek Cassese: 20 s.

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Derek Cassese: And that adds up, if you're creating 250 fields. But I mean a year and a half from now you're gonna really wish you'd put a description in there when you named it like

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Derek Cassese: something random. Right? So

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Derek Cassese: that's that's why that's what I think is is the next steps. This, the Coe is the ultimate. I think

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Derek Cassese: the it's it's backed by a lot of data. Right? So if you create a center of excellence, and you have governance and leadership and good methodologies. And you know a project management office and good tooling products. Then it's going to eventually

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Derek Cassese: start helping clean up some of this right? You'll have projects to clean out some of the

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Derek Cassese: technical that

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Derek Cassese: there come. Are there sections of the article that I've kind of skipped around here like, there's this, where list out vision leadership. Governance. 3. Yeah, these are the that. So what you're looking at now, is it section on the Coe? So it's the key pillars of this of the center of excellence. Our vision leadership, governance, change, control, methodology, standards.

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Derek Cassese: metadata management. It's a big one.

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Derek Cassese: Architecture, security change, management.

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Derek Cassese: pmo, tooling and innovation.

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Derek Cassese: That's a lot of stuff. But think about like

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Derek Cassese: making sure somebody is watching each one of those sections

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Derek Cassese: right? Think of the difference that it would have on the on, on the platform. That's basically holding the keys to your company, which is your customer data.

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Derek Cassese: So that's that's and you know. And and you can like, I said, if you if you do a Google on salesforce cue. There's a lot of information out there on, and there's even a trail I believe there's on, and how you can go, what it is and how you can start it, and and etc.

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Andy Whiteside: How does this so that there's a chart below that has? Well, first of all, what do they define? Your small medium and large are these org sizes?

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. So I think that. So what they're doing is they basically have

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Derek Cassese: small medium or large deployments. Right? So it's it's essentially done where you know, small, small or small admin teams with limited developers. Right? Would be a small coe. If that's where you fall like, you don't need

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Derek Cassese: 30 people right? But you're gonna need a significant, you're gonna need a fairly large group of people in the Coe for somebody that has multi cloud multi orgs. You know, 30,000 users. That type of stuff, right? And what they did was

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Derek Cassese: certain areas of those pillars you can take on or off, based on your on your size. Right? So somebody, you know, for example, large, has every one of those pillars we just mentioned ticked right? But small has, you know, governance, change, control, methodology.

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Derek Cassese: change management and tooling. right? As kind of

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Derek Cassese: represented as what do they? Said the blue was, I gotta. I gotta remember. Here blue is needed purple's mandatory. So the mandatory aspects. There you go, the mandatory aspects and smaller leadership.

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Derek Cassese: metadata, management, architecture and security, those 4 for small, which is what we just mentioned. Right small group.

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Derek Cassese: and then they kind of go through adding, right? So if you get a little bit bigger. Now you've got to add change management, and you add to link to it. And then once you get to the huge multi or

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Derek Cassese: you need it all right, and that in this just trying to help. I know we're already giving away a lot of stuff for free with our micro assessment, our security assessment, but to me and and a a consult around center of excellence, and walking through where customer fits in this table and explain in each piece would be just extremely

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Derek Cassese: partner value, add, oh, it would be. Yeah, it would be very, very

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Derek Cassese: I think that it would be a little eye-opening, because you, you start thinking about the things that you're potentially not doing right now, or not looking at, or maybe just

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Derek Cassese: kind of ad hoc, right? And then

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Derek Cassese: absolutely thinking about what you know. And then so the other. The other Co. Like side of the point of this, is alright. So we create the Coe like, what is it actually giving back to the Comp to the company? Right? Are we just creating another like

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Derek Cassese: change board bureaucracy? Where, if I want something done. It's gonna take an extra 4 weeks. You know that type of stuff. And I think that's why the vision of these needs to be very clearly articulated. And that's that's more like that's in inside the company. I get to understand, like, what is the overall goal? What are you trying to achieve, which is.

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Derek Cassese: you know, what is the overall vision, for the coe for salesforce is to make sure that you. You may remain agile, sustainable, to right, to meet, to meet the needs of your customers right, and to make sure that you don't do anything that would inhibit that

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Derek Cassese:  so that I mean, I think that's all. And that's where I believe, like what you're saying. Right partners can come in. That, you know. Have

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Derek Cassese: you have experience in these types of engagements where you're actually creating a Coe with with a customer. And that's for like the collaboration aspect of this is really fascinating. Because this isn't just like, Hey, we're gonna have a couple of sessions. And you know, you file these check boxes. And you're now you've got a coe right? This is these are like in depth discussions, understanding the moving pieces

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Derek Cassese: and really wrapping your arms around what is now a strategic platform as opposed to just a tactical piece of software. Well, to me this is would be valuable to a customer supporting their user customers. And what it might uncover is that the organization that you may be working with today does not want you to do this, because then it would highlight what you thought about a while ago that they're really just coming in and doing what you tell them to do, which is potentially stacking onto the mess.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. Yup.

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Derek Cassese: And then, you know, they go in, and they've got some customer references on experiences that they have with setting up the Coe. And again, this is, there's a lot of data on this on the success of creating one of these as it pertains to a complex environment that is salesforce. And you could, I mean, you could basically say this for any of these large platforms today. Right? Service. Now.

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Derek Cassese: another one, I mean, all these platforms start to get legs and start to add more pieces. cause they're not just like these companies. We're not just gonna stand still right. If a company's successful in one area, they're gonna start doing M and A, they're gonna start adding pieces. They're gonna start bleeding into other. You know, other areas.

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Derek Cassese: And then you start having the same problem. Just not. Maybe not right now. But it will happen as these, because these are all a lot of these cloud platforms are all

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Derek Cassese: very configurable. I think that I mean I will stand by and say that I believe Salesforce is the most customizable, configurable platform on the planet.

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Derek Cassese: And because of that, we're talking about this right now. It's it's it's it's kind of a victim of its own success. They've they've made it that way on purpose from day one

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Andy Whiteside: well, guess what that's how you end up with this.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. Right? Last section just says, final word.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. So in the article from Forrester, which is where this whole thing kinda started right, the salesforce at scale dilemma. By the way, the add and that is the at symbol.

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Derek Cassese: it says it says in here. I'll read this because it's like

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Derek Cassese: part of what we're trying to drive home is that this the salesforce at scale dilemma is a challenge for clients to overcome rather than an inevitable outcome

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of large scale strategic salesforce implementations.

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Derek Cassese: It is a big issue because sales force has become a much more strategic supplier in technology strategies to win, serve and retain customers.

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Derek Cassese: So what they're saying is, it's not the end of the world. Right? There are. There are ways out of this. There are tools that will help you get out of this. There are partners. Hint, hint that will help you get out of this.

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Derek Cassese: But don't. It's not something that should be swept under the under the rug, because anybody that knows their salesforce or knows that more than likely

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Derek Cassese: there's a bunch of what we call technical debt sitting in there. And if you've had more than one admin, if you've had more than one partner there is technical debt. If you haven't gotten rid of your process builders. There's technical debt.

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Derek Cassese: If you haven't gone in and deleted things ever. Yeah, there's technical that

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Derek Cassese: so. And that's the stuff that you need to you need to be careful of. And again, you know. you don't want to be vanilla with salesforce, but you also don't want to over customize with salesforce.

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Derek Cassese: And I think that

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Derek Cassese: when you do customize something. Yeah, this is something real quick. Is that this like, I see a way right? If you've let's just say there's no solution for something that you're trying to do. Alright.

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Derek Cassese: I don't know. Maybe you're trying to let me think of something that would make sense here. Maybe you're trying to relate a contact with multiple accounts.

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Derek Cassese: Okay? Now, before salesforce came out with account contact relationships, you might have built your own right. You might have come up with a what they call junction object, for the developers out there did allows you to do that. But then, when the feature gets released from salesforce, there's a decision point.

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Derek Cassese: Do we keep going down the path of our own, or do we move to the one that came from salesforce right? And that, I think, is a decision that more than likely the choice is well, it's we are too busy. We're it's not broken. We're gonna keep what we have.

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Derek Cassese: And then that gets compounded. And then you have met eventually can't get out from underneath the burden of all your customizations. So

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Derek Cassese: partners, tools you you can get out from underneath it. But it's something to be aware of. I wanted to bring it up. I'm fascinated by the concept just because

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Derek Cassese: I see it a lot. And I know that

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Derek Cassese: people would be much more excited about using salesforce if things were a little bit more

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Derek Cassese:  clean in the environment. I think you'd have faster agility. And when you have faster agility, you have happy users, cause when they they, when they're heard, and they say, Hey, it'd be nice to have this, and they actually get that. But in like

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Derek Cassese: a good amount of time, not 2 years from the time they brought it up. I think it's a good thing all around.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: that you you're only preventing. Well, I'll I'll say this way you get a lot of as we are in it. I consider myself an it guy. Yeah, we have lots that we can do. Therefore we do it and we turn them on. We flip switches. And without that group as a guiding light so that we can really create a mess

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Andy Whiteside: and you know, finding out you gotta miss sooner rather than later is the right time.

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Derek Cassese: Yep. Yup, Yup!

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Andy Whiteside: Well, there! What? What didn't we cover? You wanted to cover on this topic.

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Derek Cassese: II think we we covered enough. I mean, there's like, I said, there's a lot of there's a lot more that we can dig into on center of excellence, maybe at a later time like, and get into a little bit more detail on what creating that looks like and get some more experiences on it.

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Derek Cassese: But yeah, I think from the perspective, what I wanted to get across today, we've covered the article talked about the forester article. So there's some references in there for folks, and really, just you know

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Derek Cassese: it. It. The time is now, because, you know, when this came out in 2,020 is bad, and it's E. It's just getting even worse, right? So the time is now for folks that either own or an admin, or who, however, whatever part you're in from a salesforce perspective, to bring this up to the right people in your organization reach out to partners like Tegra and and start.

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Derek Cassese: you know, start untangling that way. Yeah, so kind of when you're on spot here. But could you go in and do a consult on this like at any point in time, and might through the concept. Yeah.

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But we we probably need to get that together and start offering that as some type of package cause that that would make a lot of sense every nobody just like with our security assessments on salesforce. Nobody should say no to that.

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Andy Whiteside: You open up, partner, coming in and and help to shed light on this problem. That

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Derek Cassese: is, it's either there or it's becoming there one or the other. Yeah, and it's and it's, you know, the whole concept of Coe is something that could even be expanded way way beyond just salesforce. Right? It's it's a methodology concept. It's a governance concept. It's it's it's a pretty interesting

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Derek Cassese: approach to this issue.

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Derek Cassese: Are there people out there that are just centers of excellence. Consultants. Just understand this thing to see if there's people that just specialize specialize in that. So I'm not sure but

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Derek Cassese: there may be. But like, I said, there's a lot of it like salesforce has a lot of information specifically around salesforce, because obviously, it's in their best interest to help customers be successful, and they've seen success with this approach. So

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Derek Cassese: you know, there's trails. There's articles. There's more articles, and I think that so I think what happened to like. There's some videos out there as well. You know, once for came out with this article.

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Derek Cassese: It kind of opened the door for some, you know, some innovation. So you've got, you know, companies like elements cloud that are here to address things like that to help with release management. And you know, put in app feedback. Right? I mean, I like, I mean, remember, back in the day I came up with the whole. Tell it right where you know, in app feedback, like, give feedback at the time you're using something.

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Derek Cassese: It's so valuable. So

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Derek Cassese: all these things will help with user experience. But I but just

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Derek Cassese: cause we're gonna we're in exciting times right now with salesforce, with whole, the whole AI thing and data cloud and all. I mean, you've you've got like you gotta get your house in order before any of that stuff's gonna make any sense right?

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Derek Cassese: So this is like, step one like, let's let's clean the house up a little bit. Let's get a grip on what we're doing, what we have, what we don't need.

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Derek Cassese: so that we're setting ourselves up to to innovate and take advantage of the next phase that's coming out from an innovation perspective from salesforce. AI, you know what, whatever the next thing is gonna be

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Derek Cassese: yep. So

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Andy Whiteside: whatever next thing is gonna be now it's time to get the house organized cause you're gonna be bringing home new Christmas presents. Yeah, Derek, for let you go. What any ideas on things you want to cover in the upcoming weeks.

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Derek Cassese: So I mean one of the other things I was gonna get into is was

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Derek Cassese: devops so like, How how are customers actually doing change management like, how are you, ma? How are you. How are you going about

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Derek Cassese: adding capabilities to your environment? Right? Are you doing stuff? Just a production using sandboxes? What's the best approach? Has anybody use the new devops from Salesforce. And the reason that I bring that up is because I think that

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Derek Cassese: there's opportunity there for

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Derek Cassese: customers to be a little bit more

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Derek Cassese: a little bit more agile in the way they develop stuff so that they can have more than one person. They can have a team of developers. They can bring in partners

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Derek Cassese: and collaborate and and get stuff out the door quicker. Right? I mean, I'm always looking at like the the time to value stuff right? Like, you know, if it takes 2 years to get something out.

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Derek Cassese: That's just to me that's just takes too long. Right? So that that's one area. But then, you know, I was also gonna do a review. I mean, we just got the spring release. There's a lot of really cool features that they released. So that would be another one. I know there's probably a lot of blog articles already covering that

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Derek Cassese: and then that is another one at some point I wanna talk about is, what do you do to prep yourself for releases? Right? So what do you do to prep yourself for the upcoming release from salesforce. Do you know that you can go into your organ? Look at release readiness. Do you know that you can create a sandbox with the new stuff. Like all that, I think that's another one that we'll get into at some point in the next couple podcasts.

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Derek Cassese: yeah, that's you know, we got you these modern day platforms, Saas base the releases just keep coming. But that doesn't mean you're you're ready for them and and understand what to expect.

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Derek Cassese: and then there'll be some stuff coming out of trail that Dx. Which is the Developer Conference in March. I'm sure there'll be some announcements, and that's more on the develop. And that's really a a lot of what we're talking about. Here, too, is just maintain an admin and control over the org and all that stuff. So be interesting to see if there's any new

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Derek Cassese: anything new that relates to. We talked about today that comes out of that conference.

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Derek Cassese: Alright, sir, we're good chatting with you again, and we'll plan it is again in a week or so. Sounds good. Thanks, dear.