Salesforce environments can start small, but over time they can grow both in size and complexity, including the volume of staff needed to manage them. Some businesses, especially larger enterprises, bring together experienced Salesforce professionals from several different arms of the organization, uniting them in one “Center of Excellence”, effectively acting as the conductor of the orchestra – making sure each separate team is aligned in crucial metrics.
This makes a lot of sense on paper, but should senior Salesforce professionals advocate for the creation of this center? And what are the road bumps that might arise if they get the go-ahead?
What Is a Salesforce Center of Excellence?
As David Shannon, Senior Principal, Digital Platforms at Infosys Consulting said while speaking at the Salesforce Ben FinServ Summit in November, if you get 10 people who do a Center of Excellence (CoE) in a room, you’ll get 11 answers about what it is.
“I like to think of it as being the strategic brain of your Salesforce operations,” Mr Shannon said. “The way that you bring together the skills, the people, the capabilities into one place so you can drive better outcomes, you can reduce duplication, and you can get more efficiency for your operations on Salesforce.”
Salesforce has long marketed itself as providing a ‘360 view’ of everything you need to do sales. But, in an ironic ‘who watches the watchmen?’ kind of way, when a business becomes truly enterprise-level and vast in scope, the question arises: ‘Who has the 360 view of our Salesforce orgs?’ That’s where the Center of Excellence comes in.
In short: a CoE is a central hub with the responsibility of making sure the other hubs are functioning optimally. The center brings people who are working just on Salesforce together in one single place.
“They’re the experts in what they’re working on at the time, and they bring that best in breed from each of the different areas across your organization into one place,” Mr Shannon says. “But it doesn’t have to be an organizational change. It can be a virtual Center of Excellence where you identify who all those people are and put a badge on them and say they’re part of the Center of Excellence.”
Why Might You Need One?
At the Salesforce Ben FinServ summit, we also spoke to David Morris, Product Owner of Salesforce at Barclays Group, about why it’s so important in financial services to have a Center of Excellence or some form of control over the board. Mr Morris said that financial services face higher levels of regulation than most.
He told us: “I’ve never worked in an environment so demanding, frankly, in terms of compliance, risks, controls. It’s not just fixing an issue or closing a gap. It’s proving that you’ve done it consistently, you do it safely, the people approve it, did you tell the regulator about it?
“It’s that whole industry, cottage industry almost, of making sure that your orgs are secure, that you’re compliant, and then you’re meeting the obligations. That could be different across many different areas of your bank or your organization as well. It’s not just one-size-fits-all. Its people have different demands, different needs, different ways of closing it.”
Large financial services organizations like Barclays can have 20 or more orgs. If regulation comes in, the Center of Excellence can bring all of these together to explore possible options, rather than handling each org individually.
Mr Morris said: “If something comes in and it’s urgent and you need to be compliant by Q1 or something, the most efficient way to deal with that is to get a central team to go to help us sort it. We see that fire, or fire drill, if you like, coming in all the time. For us, having a central team that’s there for the time – really, really important.”
More Benefits for Your Salesforce Team
We asked Mr Shannon about how a Center of Excellence could transform an organization, and he said that it might not be the best way to think about it. The CoE isn’t about helping you be better with one org – but improving Salesforce operations across your business.
He said: “I could list numerous examples of where we’ve been helping large enterprise organizations try and get a handle on numerous orgs where they’ve been disjointed, where they’ve been duplicated, where there’ve been gaps in their compliance and issues have been brought up, where bringing to bear a Center of Excellence of some sort brings them control, brings them operational excellence, and brings them a sense of belonging for those Salesforce employees – who are hard people to get hold of and keep hold of – by bringing them together and making them feel valued and worthwhile.”
Mr Shannon added that businesses can get a big boost in retention of Salesforce professionals through the Center of Excellence – along with an increase in successful deployments, with people following best practices, learning from one part of your org, and replicating it elsewhere.
Visibility is also a major boon. When you have an organization with 20 orgs, there’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes, “undercover”, which does not necessarily get recognized in the wider business.
Mr Shannon said: “When an issue comes up or when you’re starting to talk about license renegotiation, it’s suddenly, ‘Do I use that capability? Do I have that issue or that exposure?’ By having a Center of Excellence that really does look at all your use cases, it gives you that visibility that’s really helpful.”
Sounds Great for Large Enterprises… But What About SMBs?
While this seems to make sense for a large enterprise like Barclays, surely it’s a different story for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), right? It’s only logical to have a centralized hub to oversee 20 different orgs, but what about two or three?
The Center of Excellence is intended to bring people together from lots of different businesses, helping tackle the complexity that comes with overseeing them all – especially when it comes to regulatory compliance.
But, Mr Shannon said, when you have a small business that has one or a handful of businesses, it “might be overkill”.
However, there is an argument that investing in a Center of Excellence early, and having it grow alongside the business, is preferable to having to cobble one together later down the line.
Mr Morris said that there are different ways of doing a CoE, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be a full-time role. He added: “David [Shannon] is an expert as well. We work together. Various times we’ve seen that team [in a CoE] be big, we’ve seen it be small, we’ve seen it be non-existent for a time. That doesn’t really work.
“I think you can flex it whichever way you go. But I do think, however you do it, it’s super important to recognize common themes that are long-running and make sure that you’re correlating people around those as and when you need to.
“Make sure you stay on top of some of these problems that last longer than a project. It’s stuff that’s there for years. It keeps coming back. It doesn’t go away. So it’s really important to have it. Different ways you do it, I think it’s up to you. It’s your business – what works for you.”
What Are the Challenges?
All of this sounds great, but what are the downsides?
Mr Shannon argues that these can be organizational, rather than technical, saying: “They’re about getting people to give up some control.”
A large organization like Barclays wants to control what it spends its money on, and someone setting up a CoE has to ask managers to give up some control for the greater good of the business – and a better setup that would be more efficient to run and more scalable.
“There are lots of benefits there,” Mr Shannon says, “but they have to be willing to say, ‘I’m actually going to give away some of my good people into the center.’ By giving away to the center, they might be used by someone else on what’s seen as a higher priority by the central CTO or the central organization.
“There needs to be a lot of trust between the parties that are involved, but it’s worthwhile doing in the long term if you’re serious about your Salesforce ecosystem and want it to be as efficient as possible.”
Mr Morris said that different challenges come for the Center of Excellence, which can come as an “existential crisis” for the practice.
Much like a good security team, if the CoE is running smoothly and delivering value, people might not even know that it’s there – and might start to question what use the team is, assuming that whatever value it is delivering can simply be taken for granted.
Mr Morris said: “There was a point in time where people almost became used to the fact that the practice (CoE) was there, to the point that they didn’t really think about the value that it was adding. Then they didn’t want to pay the tax, for lack of a better term, the tax to support the practice.”
Bearing that in mind, it can be important to remind people of the value that the CoE delivers, communicating and being “very overt” with it.
Final Thoughts
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the Center of Excellence, the principle is one that should put any business in good standing – even smaller-sized ones. Having a centralized body – even a part-time one – whose sole responsibility is making sure other limbs of the business are doing their part is something which simply makes good sense on an instinctual level.
The CoE’s value rises sharply as businesses grow, and regulated industries would particularly benefit from having one. But, even in lesser-regulated businesses, retaining that key Salesforce talent pool is one of the benefits.
So, even if senior Salesforce professionals don’t have the ability or the inclination to create a whole new department – plucking talent from other departments in the process – the principle of having someone looking over every org, making sure they’re all coordinating and learning from each other, is something they should consider.
