Data Cloud / Admins / Architects / Business Analysts

Understanding Salesforce Data Cloud Implementation Roles and Skillsets

By Mehmet Orun

Salesforce Data Cloud may be one of the most impactful enablers of enterprise-wide data-driven solutions that empower not only marketing activations, but also business applications, automation, analytics, and enterprise AI solutions. However, while Data Cloud significantly accelerates implementations that would otherwise use a broad mix of technologies from different solution providers, there are still different jobs to be done to deliver business results.

In this article, I will share my personal perspectives on what these jobs and required skill sets are and how you can map them to existing Salesforce roles to extend skills and deliver value faster. I am going to build upon the About Salesforce Data Cloud help and training content, but also apply my own experiences as a customer, consultant, and practitioner.

Different Ways to Think About Data Cloud Roles

While the Data Cloud Consultant Certification looks at Data Cloud skills as a single concept, we can map existing Salesforce roles to Data Cloud implementations easily by focusing on jobs that need doing.

Data Cloud flow.
Source: About Data Cloud – How Does It Work.

It’s good practice to do this as most organizations have existing resources that are deeply familiar with both Salesforce technologies and specific implementation patterns. 

By thinking about how existing skillsets can accelerate Data Cloud implementation and ongoing value realization, you can simplify your resourcing while accelerating adoption.

Solution Planners

In this section, we look at the “solution planners” involved in a Data Cloud implementation, including business stakeholders, users, and technical experts, and how their collaboration ensures successful outcomes.

Business Stakeholders and Users

The first step to ensuring value from a Data Cloud implementation is to focus on a business use case and a specific person whose needs will be met better through unified insights. 

Your team will need you to articulate an ideal scenario – what would you do if you had all customer interaction information in front of you? What advantages would it bring? What is getting in the way of having it?

Whether you are an executive or end user, your insights will help identify opportunities to save time and operational costs, improve compliance, and generate more revenue faster.

Understanding your current challenges – the amount of effort you are spending to cobble information together, capturing the impact of missing information and wasted manual effort – is key in proving the value of Data Cloud-driven solutions.  

Share your experience with real data examples, along with any frustrating, repetitive patterns that could be automated to help you drive better results and improve your work-life balance. 

Your team will need your input to verify that the right insights are being delivered.

Business Analysts

As a Business Analyst, you play a pivotal role in Salesforce Data Cloud implementations by acting as the bridge between business stakeholders and technical teams. Focusing on the business outcomes and identifying obstacles without having to focus on how ensures that the solutions being implemented deliver tangible business value. You will focus on:

  • Collaborating with stakeholders to identify and define use cases, focusing on how unified customer data can drive outcomes like revenue growth, cost reduction, or improved compliance.
  • Documenting current workflows and identifying inefficiencies caused by siloed or unreliable data.  
  • Working with Data Architects and Analysts to ensure the accuracy, completeness, and reliability of the data feeding into Data Cloud.
  • Enabling user adoption by identifying improvements based on data quality and process improvement KPIs during the project, incorporating insights into testing and training content.

Solution Architects and Consultants

The need for big-picture thinking has expanded. Collaborating with business stakeholders, you are pivotal in breaking down the business value proposition into appropriate technical components and a comprehensive rollout strategy. You will hone in on key questions like:

  • What are the key sources that need to be integrated to meet the information needs of the business use case?
  • Where do you need streaming – which is a higher cost data processing flow – and when is batch processing sufficient?  
  • Should you receive the data directly from the system of record or a system of reference?
  • Should you use the out-of-the-box CRM Connector, or are there data security concerns where a subset of data should never leave the org, so you need to specify a custom integration pattern through the Data Cloud Ingestion API?
  • What Salesforce products or ISV solutions do you need to ensure and accelerate value realization while keeping your data secure? How do you demonstrate the cost-benefit?
  • What is the best scope and sequence of your implementation, so you can prove value and approach as quickly as possible and iterate?

In smaller projects, you may even play the role of a Business Analyst or UX Designer. You would create quick wireframes, identify the data sources, and decide whether they need to be real-time lookups to systems of record, calculated insights from unified data sources, or recommendations from AI.

Solution Builders 

As a solution builder, you are the application builders, admins, and marketers that help Salesforce deliver business value.

You can deliver even more value now with trusted and reliable data as well as the latest AI capabilities across structured and unstructured data sets.

Developers

Data Cloud comes with native connectors and takes advantage of MuleSoft’s connector framework as well as many data enrichment and data activation partners on AppExchange. 

But there will be times when the organization will need custom development, either for ingestion or to take advantage of the trusted and reliable data sets in other downstream solutions.

You increase Data Cloud’s value by integrating diverse data sources through APIs and SDKs. You practice development discipline outside of the Data Cloud instance while understanding the capabilities, limits, and guidelines of Data Cloud.

Data Architects and Analysts

Data architects and analysts play one of the most important roles as the resource bringing data – from different data sources, with different data models, data granularity, data quality levels, and even operational contexts together.  Your keen attention to detail is essential to deliver the unified profile that powers all solutions built on Data Cloud.

You will be profiling data from different data streams and guiding the:

  • Data modeling
  • Data governance and standardization
  • Data mapping and transformation
  • Data cleansing
  • Identity resolution decisions

Your ability to quantify your recommendations on what source data cannot be trusted and how it may negatively impact business outcomes may save the projects from repeated work, wasted time, and credits.  

Your ability to define data quality KPIs and guide the implementation of automated data trend monitoring will be essential for credit consumption forecasting, ongoing data reliability assurance, and catching data deviations that may impact design and thus solution effectiveness.

Salesforce Admins and App Developers

You are still the gatekeepers of data security, data management, and usability – and now can do so much more!

The importance of reliable data for Data Cloud can help you get the resources for that pesky data cleanup project you’ve been wanting to do.  You could even get updates from unified profiles on your local customer data or have brand new ways to tackle unintentional duplicates by providing a consistent and complete view, no matter what record a business user is looking at.

You can also drive greater efficiencies with Flow, where Data Cloud actions can initiate tasks empowering sales, service, and industry processes.

Data Visualizers

Whether you love Salesforce reports and dashboards, Tableau, or CRM-A, you can do so much more with the data. Instead of integrating and cleaning them up in one-off pipelines, data is ready for you. You can also suggest what other data sources may be useful as part of the project.

  • Lend your data analysis, data modeling,and data transformation skills to accelerate the data architecture tasks.
  • Use your understanding of the unified data model to support calculated insights.
  • With your knowledge of the data model, deliver more solutions faster.

Marketers

If you are a Salesforce Marketer, you likely already know what Data Cloud can do for you. Calculated insights that drive segments you can activate across multiple lines of business lead to more effective targeting, smarter allocation of time and money, and stronger business results.

If you are a B2B Marketer, you now have more choices.

  • Through the power of Data Enrichment solutions, Data Cloud can deliver a unified understanding of customer interactions across organization locations or subsidiaries, going beyond that of individual account records.
  • You can unify business contacts and enrich them with account-level insights.
  • Depending on your data and where you are in your maturity, you may even be able to understand and act on (compliantly) your history with individuals across business roles.

Data Scientists and AI Resources

Thank you Data Scientists and AI Specialists for putting such a strong emphasis on the importance of data reliability and taking advantage of the latest predictive and generative AI capabilities!

We give you back the time you spent data wrangling, wondering what data may be missing and how to fill the gaps using one-off processes, and instead provide you with complete, consistent, and contextual insights.  

Engage with your architects and share your business purpose as a type of user in service of business teams, so they can design the proper data spaces, controls, and flows to meet your needs.

Don’t forget to leverage Data Quality KPIs so you can incorporate reliability scores into your predictions.

Data Reliability Maintainers

Ideally, with all business solutions, you have a process to monitor their adoption and ongoing value delivery. A key aspect of this assurance is to ensure data in business applications is reliable. Since Data Cloud unifies data from multiple sources, this task is even more important.

Data Specialists/Data Governance Managers

I will admit, your job is getting harder and easier at the same time as the data scope has increased. 

With that said, instead of having multiple single sources of truth or a widely distributed technology stack, you can now respond to business outcomes focused on data standardization, data retention, and data usage policy inquiries that can be specified, monitored, and enforced in a simpler solution architecture.

You work with the solution architects to allow the implementation of the business solution while ensuring data reliability and compliance. Data architects are your advocates and allies as you work together to deliver common solutions. Data model objects are driven by the enterprise view.

Partners (SIs and ISVs)

You have often been at the forefront of helping organizations of all sizes understand and benefit from the value of Data Cloud.

As ISVs, you identify common needs with repeated implementation patterns to deliver secure, easy-to-use, performant solutions that address business needs at scale while reducing overall implementation cost and uncertainty.

As SI Partners, you are applying best practices from the Salesforce ecosystem and data project experiences. You fill the above-mentioned roles when your client does not have them in-house.  You identify product features and enablement content that can be better so we can keep addressing more and more complex needs, delivering continuous business value.  

Either way, you are driven by the journey of learning and multiplying your experience across companies.

Working Together Iteratively

I mentioned earlier how Data Cloud’s architecture also makes iterative project planning and delivery much easier. Before we wrap up, I want to give you a quick tutorial of how.

We should always lead with a business use case first, then the business persona’s needs. Solution architects need to ensure a long-term vision and plan while providing a tactical focus.  

This is also an opportunity for business analysts to dive deep and engage broadly while the first use case starts coming to life.

Some use cases will require external data integration. For your first couple of use cases, you can start quickly and easily with the out-of-the-box connectors. As a data architect or analyst, focus on the key data source objects and even fields based on the needs of the use case – do not try to analyze and map everything. 

Your first mission is to deliver trusted, unified profiles that bring the records together correctly, so solution builders can start taking advantage of it. You can then keep adding more fields to your DMO over time. 

The business benefit of delivering results faster is often higher than the cost of reprocessing a set of data to bring your implementation breadth to parity.

Once there is verified reliable data, you can have different solution builders work on it at different times. Do you want to start with a Tableau view, and then two weeks later integrate it into a CRM view? Great! The goal is continuous value realization built on reliable data.  

READ MORE: How to Plan Your Salesforce Data Cloud Use Cases

Final Thoughts

I hope you find this framework for understanding Data Cloud roles both useful and engaging.  Feel free to go back to the original H&T content now, where you may feel this particular spin that may resonate with you more is not the same as how roles were described when documentation was first released. 

Why? Because we are always learning and have a chance to get better, especially when we put our thoughts down on paper and seek feedback.

Whether you liked this or not, I’d love to hear your thoughts and your rationale in the comments below.

The Author

Mehmet Orun

Mehmet is a Salesforce veteran and data management SME, having worked with Salesforce since 2005 as a customer, employee, practice lead, and partner. Now GM and Data Strategist for PeerNova, an ISV partner focused on data reliability, as well as Data Matters Global Community Leader.

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