Salesforce: force.com custom objects case study

These videos collectively represent a Motorola case study. These very short videos confirm that custom objects is the modus operandi for professional services and the power of using force.com for human systems.

Motorola use force.com to configure custom objects to build most of their solutions. See short video.
http://tiny.cc/08bp5/

Motorola use force.com as one human systems database supporting a universal sign-on. See short video. http://tiny.cc/k4lyv

Motorola uses force.com as one human system to find data and knowledge quickly for fast response to emergent needs. See short video. http://tiny.cc/lrkzz 

Force.com demo uses 5GL to configure Custom Objects

Salesforce Force.com uses 5GL to create Custom Objects (data and functions). 

Creating Custom Objects is easy because of the unique 5GL capabilities within Force.com developed by Salesforce over the past 10 years or more.  What is important is the design of Custom Objects,  Corporate Data Dictionary, Measurement, Reusability across the Enterprise etc.

To demonstrate the simplicity of using 5GL, the following  video is worth watching. It is just over 3 minutes. http://tiny.cc/hxhji

It shows building a Force.com App from scratch by configuring a new Custom Object. 

Force.com Content Management: Diversity of Capability

Content Management is a term that now represents a diverse range of capability.

Within the force.com at the basic level the following list provides some of the content management capability:

Chatter Overview: Collaboration and Content

• Collaboration Fully part of Force.com
•  People and bios; find people  
•  Corporate Directory  
• Follow spreadsheets and other Files
• Links with other systems
• Filters with drill down
• Pull data from other social networks
• Groups – sharing project plans
• Link to Mobile Lite
• Video 4.07 minutes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puydh-ey_2k

Chatter: Collaboration around  Files

•  The term Files means Document
• Load Files
• Search Files
•  Follow Files – This means you get notified every time there is a change; you can have discussion groups around the File – Private or Public
•  As a File could be an Executive Report then you have collaboration around the document
• File Version Management – ensure people access the latest version
• Private File Sharing  - meaning you name the people that can view the File
•  Avoids the need for email to send copies of Files in attachments – now you load once and have multiple assess – this will cut down a lot of email traffic and cut down server storage
•  Video 1.3 minutes demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYyRgyDZIW4

Force.com Sites - Content Management System for Websites   

·         Public facing websites using Force.com – one human system

• Content Management System for Websites – Feature on Force.com
•  Content on Website, Social Media like Facebook and Mobile; create once access from multiple touchpoints
•  Fully integrated as part of Force.com
• Create and edit multiple Websites
•  5GL Content Management – means marketing can do the work themselves without the need for web developers
•  Everything is built and maintained around Panels – sections of a web page
• Integrates with workflow and approvals – this means you can adopt corporate practices to manage change
• Publishing into production is one click
• Build eforms
• Includes alerts etc
• RSS feeds
• Undertake ecommerce
• Warning – as its 5GL it empowers business people like marketing but deskills web specialists
• Video 2.52 minutes Force.com Sites Overview including Case Studies from multiple organisations and building a website using 5GL http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=8tf_WaD52mI
• Video 2.31 minutes demo for Content Management System  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLTxXlJT_0M

Demo Chatter and Content

•  Includes file upload and sharing
• Feedback and comments
•  Feeds related to File
• Shared workspace
•  Delivery options
• Delivery Links from email back into the content
• Video 3.37 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yst8I1kb4T4

File Collaboration – Demonstration

• Find a file: search, browse, filer, follow, share, groups
• Share a file with someone
• Collaborate on a file
• Share a file with a group
•  Change permission: update / read only
•  Deliver content - publication
•  Send to client
• All 5GL
• Video: as above 3.35 minutes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IavvnAQJ9bc

Force.com Linking Account / Contacts with Content Management / Social Media  

• ·         Shows setting up contacts using 5GL
• ·         Capture emails and track
• ·         Link Files
• ·         Inset Google Maps
• ·         Bring data from Twitter and LinkedIn
• ·         Video 2.58 minutes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8eZaoGWZjA

Using Content in Force.com Workflow and Approvals

•  Visual workflow and approvals
• Link Files / Content / Email  to Workflows and Approvals
•  Video 2.02  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM3xHN8M9-8 Example shows recruitment

Multilingual Content

·         Translation workbench

·         View in different languages

·         Video: 1.16 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-AJIqgdsB0&feature=relmfu

Rich Text Fields

•  Design of rich text content using 5GG
• Video 1.30 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_801682&src_vid=4iH7CHRG2o0&v=pmrteIlyHGw

Mobile Lite – Standard

•  Supports accounts, contacts, tasks
• Search
• Chatter
• Blackberry and iPhone

There is much more but the above is a start. 

Social Media is going mainstream: but is your company ready to be a social enterprise?

Social Media is going mainstream: but is your company ready to be a social enterprise?

Dreamforce 2011: Marc Benioff and Eric Schmidt Keynote Discussion

This is an excellent session captured on video of a discussion between Marc Benioff and Eric Schmidt.

http://tiny.cc/mo9wu

Eric outlines beyond Social Enterprise, which involves artificial agents having dialogue with customers through their mobile phone. Some of this thinking was encapsulated in a paper published by the Economics Intelligence Unit called the Future of Marketing: Moving from Monologue to Dialogue that was sponsored by Google. Though it was published in 2006 it has become clear this is an integral part of the Google strategy. Eric now sees that the dialogue platform sits above the Social Enterprise Platform. No wonder Marc and Eric are on the same stage.

Dreamforce 2011: Marc Benioff's keynotes are now on video

The Entire Dreamforce Keynote 2011 by Marc Benioff is now available on-line:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By7abvkNLS4

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ldVcOOxr5A

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Skf4kxcGc

Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofaDa07v7l0

Part 3 includes Lord Rothermere, Chairman of DMGT. 

The gamification market starts to grow as new companies use it as a loyalty differential

Gamification platforms have raised over $30 million this year (source: Gabe Zichermann is chair of the Gamification Summit, an entrepreneur, and author of Gamification By Design and Game-Based Marketing).

New business start-ups are using gamification from the start to develop loyalty. One example is flickme.com, which is a new streaming film rental/buying site which is also accessible via Facebook. It assigns a Beta badge for being an early adopter. Completing certain tasks earns one badges and points. There’s a set of leaderboards. 

 
By 2015 70 percent of the Global 2000 will use gamification (Source Gartner Group) spending over $1.6 billion in the U.S.A alone (source M2 Research). 

Gamification is changing loyalty marketing and social engagement

Source: BizReport article by Kirstina Knight

Gamification is helping to rebuild the loyalty space. Gamification makes it simpler for brands to engage and for consumers to earn rewards. This, of course, keeps the consumer coming back.

Here are some of the highlights from the article:

1. Gamification is another form of loyalty … identity is now available on the web because of sites like Facebook and Twitter. 
2. The social graph is a major accelerant to the value of social rewards and behaviour. 
3. Gamification can be about loyalty or engagement. 
4. Finding ways to make social experiences meaningful and exciting is a major trend and it's falling under the umbrella of gamification. 
5. Expect to see even deeper social capabilities. 
6. Right now, Gamification 1.0 is about status, reputation, points, level, achievements--powerful motivating sources of behaviour. The next phase is making those much more social, akin to how social gaming elevated gaming and transformed the industry.

Keynote Marc Benioff conversation with Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google about the digital roadmap

The most exciting part of this keynote dialogue was Marc asking Eric what is going to be beyond the Social Enterprise.

Eric answered by saying that mobile will become our personal advisor so that, with permission, it will use point of presence to suggest choices that are most likely to be of interest at that moment in time. This he believes will be the next paradigm shift based on ‘sensing’ and ‘responding’ using contextual dialogue. Therefore, he passionately believes the next generation of apps will be based around predictive states and artificial agents for meaningful dialogue.

This positioning ought not to be a surprise as Larry Page and Sergey Brin both believe the future will be driven more and more by Artificial Intelligence. It is also in keeping with the web road map:

• Web 3.0 Cloud and Mobile with Social Enterprise leading the way 
• Web 4.0 Artificial Intelligence Complementing Humans 
• Web 5.0 Artificial Intelligence Surpassing Humans 

Eric positioned the future state in line with Web 4.0 and Web 5.0 and articulated that a higher level of platform (presence + predictive + artificial agents) will sit above the Social Enterprise platform. It is no wonder Marc and Eric are on the same stage as they are creating a win-win future state.

Eric believes ‘mobile first’ is the priority for developing apps. No wonder Marc has recently launched the Mobile AppExchange as an accelerator for businesses to go global.

Marc and Eric were both in agreement it is now all about social + mobile + open + local + real-time.

It seems to me solution-sets should be local, national and global – this three tiered framework is now feasible for forward thinking corporates.

One final note, both Marc and Eric are seriously concerned at the lack of new ideas for job creation. New models are needed and are needed fast. 

Dreamforce 2011 some of the force.com features

Here are some of the Force.com features:

• declarative logic (5GL)
• workflow and logic
• analytics
• Chatter built-in
• mobile ready
• open APIs
• APEX programmatic logic
• Visual Force for front-ends 
• Security and sharing rules
• Chatter Connect for data feeds
• Mobile: touch.salesforce.com and HTML5
• Open streaming API
• Siteforce

There has been a major update to make the workflow more drag-and-drop, clicks not code  

Dreamforce 2011 Some of the database.com features

Here are some of the highlights for database.com:

• Social Enterprise data model
• Shared security model
• REST API lets you integrate with Force.com applications using simple HTTP methods
• Tool-kit for Android and iOS (Apple)
• Platform agnostic API
• Data Residency Option

Also its free to get started

• 100,000 records
• 50,000 transactions per month 
• 3 enterprise users 

Dreamforce 2011 Changing the corporate and investment economics of apps

At the moment there are over 1,250 apps on the Appexchange which are designed not to 'reinvent the wheel'. This is already the world's leading cloud exchange for corporate apps, which is already a $500m market place.

The Appexchange is still quite small compared to

• Facebook which has 550,000 apps 
• Apple + Google which have 750,000 apps 

New apps are being developed all the time. 

The most impressive new entry is a company called Kenandy which raised funding from Salesforce and  Kleiner Perkins. The investment decision by Ray Lane from Kleiner Perkins took only 5 days because of the credential of the founder Sandy Kurtzig. Kenandy's market sector is social manufacturing. 

What is amazing is that the first social manufacturing app took 14 days to build.

Now Salesforce has launched the Mobile Appexchange. 

The investment cycles for new apps has changed profoundly. 

Using the Social Enterprise PaaS provides scalability without any CapEx for servers.

The Appexchange will grow rapidly as corporates with their partners are likely to build apps that can be resold on the Appexchange. The notion that corporates can move from the cost of apps to generating a profit from apps is now a reality.

The advantage of corporates using partners is that they can provide the support and follow-on development. 

There is now an emerging new economic model for corporates, investors and Salesforce partners. 

Dreamforce 2011 Salesforce creates leading Social Enterprise PaaS

The Platform-as-a-Service provides the ability for an enterprise to create hundreds or thousands of apps that are underpinned by the same architecture, which has been purposed built for the Social Enterprise.

The new Social Enterprise  PaaS architecture basically consists of

Level 1 Social, Mobile, Real-time and Open

Level 2 Force.com and Heroku

Level 3 Database.com

Level 4 Data.com

Dreamforce 2011 Salesforce-to-Salesforce for sharing data across Orgs

Salesforce-to-Salesforce makes it fast and easy to share data between different Orgs. You can share lead, opportunity, account, contact, task, product, opportunity product, case, or custom object records with any other Org and get real-time updates on the shared data.

This enables collaboration to be a lot more easy.

With Salesforce-to-Salesforce, your different business units or partners can easily integrate your data with the data they manage in Salesforce. They can also integrate their business processes with updates received from you using workflow, assignment rules, and reports.

Dreamforce 2011 Gamification

Gamification was mentioned quite a lot but lacked substance. Looked at the Bunchball offering for the sales funnel but I would say it is early days.

It has become clear that there is a big difference between Consumer Gamification and Enterprise Gamification. Consumer Gamification is quite advanced but experts are struggling with Corporate Gamification ... this is a great area to evolve.

Dreamforce 2011 Artificial Agents

Virtuoz has launched a Salesforce version of its artificial agent. For issues the artificial agent cannot solve then it launches a case.

There is no doubt that Artificial Agents will have an increasing role to play in the Social Enterprise.

Dreamforce 2011 Job Science for Recruitment

Job Science has launched a product for recruitment using social enterprise. This looks like a great idea for recruitment practices to increase their productivity and value to clients. It uses the sales funnel concept except that it has been re-purposed for recruitment.

Dreamforce 2011 Tenrox

Tenrox is now integrated with Salesforce.

Dreamforce 2011 New Licence Agreement

It was announced today that there is a new Social Enterprise Licence that has unlimited use of products and users.

The first contract has been signed by Coco Cola.

No cost details have been provided.

Dreamforce 2011 Social Command Centres

A number of Salesforce clients are using Radian6 to run Command Centres that are monitoring social networks. This capability is to create Lead Indicators of emergent patterns that is being used to drive personalised service and innovation of new products.

The new version of Radian6 will be more integrated with Salesforce and will have richer abilities to listen, analyse and engage.

Radian6 has some neat capabilities including slice and dice channels. Mind you it could benefit from more visualisation capabilities ...

Dreamforce 2011 Intranets are dead, long live the social enterprise

The Service Cloud will have the richest version of Chatter which is integrated across all channels and touch points. This level of integration means that if one cannot find the knowledge then the use of Chatter will often help solve the problem.

The richness of the Service Cloud is the highest form of the Social Enterprise, which is a blended solution-set of employees, customers, suppliers and partners working together but within whatever restrictions are deemed necessary. So an employee may belong to several groups with each group involving different customers.

The richness of this capability means the intranet as we know it is dead!!

Dreamforce 2011 Salesforce launch touch.salesforce.com

The touch.salesforce.com is yet another big announcement.

Basically this capability drives HTML5. In other words, you can design experiences across all mobile, tablet and PC devices.

This enables HTML5 to be used to develop apps that run natively but within the Cloud.

So touch.salesforce.com (needs a better name) is a platform for front-ends.

So you can design a front-end that orchestrates data from different force.com orgs, database.com, data.com and Heroku.  If this is confusing then read my earlier blogs.

All you need now are good designers that can simulate the different experiences, which are underpinned by the same data and functionality.

Dreamforce 2011 Salesforce launches data.com

Autumn Release

Data.com is a new capability which is an aggregation of Jigsaw data (crowd-sourcing with gamification to drive data quality for customer data) and Dun & Bradstreet data.

Data.com uses external data to provide updates to your customer data for marketing and sales.

Link data.com with the Social CRM announcement of automatically getting customer social data and the combination is awesome.

All we need now is better visualisation of this data ..... big hint for Fractal Maps ....

Link the above to the next generation of loyalty scheme with gamification!!

Dreamforce 2011 Chatter Everywhere

Autumn Release

• Chatter contains the Now presence. This means you know if some is available. You can then use Chatter Chat which is instant messaging. 
• Chatter Connect makes it easier to extend Chatter into other systems so for example there is an API for SharePoint.
• Chatter Groups means you can collaborate around documents and cases. A big feature is that you can have a Chatter Group include customers, in the comfort that they cannot go outside the group's walled garden. One idea is to use customers in a group for peer-to-peer problem solving and ideas generation.
• Chatter will include Face Time for video conferencing and collaboration. Big implications for customer support, problem solving and co-innovation with the customer for new product design.
• Chatter Inline that has a taxonomy filter for rapid drill down.
• Chatter Approvals which supports work flows using smarter collaboration and decisioning.
• Can also have in-line videos with chatter interactions. 
• Extend Chatter to mobile apps for employees and customers alike.
• Collaborate around documents and files. 
• Chatter for collaborative revenue forecasting 
• The above supports crowd-sourcing.
• The above supports sales teams.

Dreamforce 2011 Database.com is social and solves data sensitivities

Winter Release

database.com truly becomes the first cloud social database offering at scale.  By social it means it is open and includes all media types and mobile. The big media companies are already using database.com for social video services.

Along with this release is DRO Data Residency Option which enables data to be picked up through any source including legacy systems such as SharePoint and Lotus Notes. It includes handling data that needs to remain stored within the corporate firewalls.

This is a big change and should drive cloud integration with the world of legacy whilst driving innovation for high end social enterprise solutions.

Dreamforce 2011 CRM to enrich the customer data with their social data

New Winter Release

The standard CRM customer data will be updated in real time with their social data from targeted social networks including:

• Facebook
• Twitter 
• LinkedIn 

These updates are based on real time streaming and includes pictures. 

The implications are huge ..... 

Dreamforce 2011: Three steps to deliver social enterprise

Source: Marc Benioff keynote

Step 1:    Create a social customer profile - this includes external data from social networks

Step 2:    Create an employee social network

• Collaborate 
• Connect and sell
• Service and engage 
• Automate and extend 

Step 3:     Create a customer social network and a product social network

• Social marketing
• Listen and analyse 
• Product and partners 

The customer experience starts with knowing who they are and what they like. 

Social Enterprise is about the NOW transformation that delights customers in a new way. 

Social engagement led to the Arabic Spring using social networking as the catalyst for change.

Marc believes we have now started the Enterprise Spring as social networking will become the catalyst for changing the value of brands for better or for worse. 

Dreamforce 2011: Marc Benioff keynote launches social enterprise as a true paradigm shift

Marc Benioff announced today a fundamental shift for Salesforce as its Autumn Release (probably in October) will put the company in the way it operates as fully immersive into Social Enterprise. Today's announcements are designed to engage the corporate leadership in a way that will fundamentally change their strategies and it is already happening!

The list of corporate leaders that have adopted this approach already is truly impressive.

Lord Rothermere, DMGT stated that since adopting social enterprise he has seen more innovation in the past few months compared to the previous 12 years.

Another corporate leader for the UK was Angela Ahrendts, the CEO of Burberry. She met Marc in May of this year and was so inspired about the social enterprise that she has already launched Burberry World.

Other impressive stories came from Toyota that has branded the term Toyota Friend which is a new concept Marc calls Product Social Networks. Coco Cola has also adopted this approach by using their vending machines to become smart by interacting with the customer and using gamification as a rewards system.

My passion is artificial agents and using them to advance Product Social Networks is a pure natural fit. Any product could then have a dialogue with customers.

It was amazing to listening to Groupon, who integrated social enterprise into their offering from the outset leading to their spectacular growth.

Dreamforce is about business and the vast majority of people are from the business side.

Microsoft, Oracle and SAP now feel like dinosaurs in comparison as their community are the tech heads. I do wish Steve Ballmer reads this as I did try and get him to focus on business people and not technology some years ago!!

Today, there were so many new product announcements that it is the equivalent of a 10 year cycle for traditional software products. It has only taken Salesforce 10 months to deliver thus cycle compared to 10 years!!

Well done to Marc Benioff and his team as they are truly going to lead the transformation of the enterprise, which is happening faster than most people realise.

Social Enterprise is agnostic in terms of age, gender, race, status etc. This is really about transparency (knowledge economy) versus non transparency (industrial economy). The outcome is inevitable!

Dreamforce 2011: some sound bytes for building customer relationships

Source: Brent Leary

Brent did quite a good presentation about CRM. There were some sound bytes worth noting:

1. Find, Catch and Keep Customers
2. Trust is highly influenced by social networking
3. 93% of customers expect brands to communicate through social media
4. Customer behaviour is being driven by mobile devices bypassing the desktop PC
5. Deal with customers in the palm of their hands
6. Interact within the social arena
7. Focus upon improving the life of the customer and not just constrain the experience around product
8. Use mobile to enrich the product experience
9. Use knowledge for self-service and first contact points
10. Transform companies to engage in customer dialogue
11. Many companies are out of sync with the need to engage in customer dialogue - they still use controlled communications
12. Good customer dialogue increases customer attention span
13. Smart social networking design drives down email traffic
14. Its about listening, understanding and responding to customer needs
15. Social media is the voice of the customer
16. Social dialogue increases customer advocacy and retention
17. Social strategies transform employee engagement
18. To measure is to know
19. Best performing companies measure twice as much and twice more frequently
20. New measures are a must
21. Handling social insights well drives prioritisation
22. The focus is now on the 'share of the dialogue'
23. Customer communities is now the frontier for 1st level problem resolution
24. Lifetime customer VALUE + INFLUENCE + ACTIVITY = Social CRM ROI
25. Experience is everything
26. Value customers beyond transactions
27. Insights + intent + empathy + action
28. Integrate social into traditional to create new processes

Dreamforce 2011: TrialForce is designed to help partners sell more apps

Source: Andrew Smith, Director, Force.com

Andrew wants to streamline the process for partners to sell more apps.

TrialForce enables customers to use an app for free over a limited period of time.

A new feature is that TrialForce can be configured to reflect a partners brand. Andrew showed how this could be dome in a matter of minutes. This is a must for marketing to package Apps for sale. It also includes insights to help increase conversions.

Dreamforce 2011 Beyond CRM - The Corporate Priorities for Legacy Apps to become Social

Source: Ron Huddleston, VP ISVs and Channel Partners

A survey with corporates that have over 1,000 employees found that beyond CRM the following are the targets for re-purposing legacy applications to the Cloud to gained the benefits of Social Enterprise:

1. Invoice Management 61%
2. Supply Chain Management 54%
3. Workforce Management 36%
4. Learning Management 34%
5. Project Management 33%

Dreamforce 2011 Mobile AppExchange Launched

Already Salesforce claim to have the world's largest exchange for Cloud Apps. In the next few months there will have been 1m Apps installed from the AppExchange.

Now Salesforce has launched a Mobile AppExchange.

Dreamforce 2011: US$50m fund to help partners grow

Source: Denzil Samuels, SVP, Partners and Solutions

Denzil announced a $50m fund to invest in partners that want to accelerate their Cloud business.

The priority are those partners that are aggressively getting their people certificated and are focused on business transformation.

Denzil announced that they will give work to partners with accredited people before they would assign the work to the Salesforce professional services.

There is currently an unmet demand for accredited people:

1. 2,000+ needed in the USA
2. 700+ needed in Europe 
3. 150+ in APAC  

Those partners that can provide accredited resources will attract investment from Salesforce to grow their workforce and help them become a global service.

Partners need to work closely with the Salesforce Solution Engagement Managers.

There is a wealth of collateral to support partner growth.

There are two new accreditation standards:

1. Gold standard for specialised markets like insurance
2. Technical Architect

The investment fund is now available for the USA and UK.

The message is clear either join and expand or become a spectator.

Dreamforce 2011 George Hu says Social Enterprise is driving transformation

Source: George Hu, EVP Platform, Marketing and Operations
George expects every session at Dreamforce will cover Social Enterprise and the way it will transform business.

The Social Enterprise is about look at things from the perspective of the customer. The solution-set is about integrating all the interactions and transactions around the customer need and value creation and extending this capability into the customers social network.

This is why employee engagement is big because the Social Enterprise needs to get all employees joined-up to listen, understand and respond to the customer.

By focusing upon the customer means engagement at the social network level.

Social Enterprise is now being positioned as the way to change everything.

Salesforce partners are encouraged to repurpose their apps with social networking.

Dreamforce 2011: ISVForce is the priority as AppExchange grows fast

Source: George Hu, EVP Platform, Marketing and Operations

               Ron Huddleston, ISV & Channel Partners

Those organisations that are ISVs by putting apps on the Cloud AppExchange are rapidly becoming a formidable source of revenue generation for Salesforce. At the same time these ISVs are growing fast.

ISVs have grown by 45% in the past year and the number of apps has grown by 208%. ISVs are now materially helping Salesforce revenue growth which is now running at a staggering 37%.

ISV revenue growth has risen by 97% leading to a 210% increase in ISV orders and a 51% increase in App installs. 

The priority is to support ISVs to grow faster especially those leading business traansformaation. 

Dreamforce 2011: Cloud Architecture and Cloud Architects are now a priority

Source: George Hu, EVP Platform, Marketing and Operations

1. Force.com for customer and employee engagement - think Social Enterprise
2. Heroku for mission critical apps needing high performance such as transactions, social video

Heroku supports Ruby on the Rails and now Java. This has big implications.

Heroku  can directly access Force.com database and database.com enabling joined up data to support mission critical applications. No need for replication.

Cloud Architecture and Cloud Architects are now a priority as there are so many elements that can be leveraged.

Salesforce announces accreditation for Cloud Architects which are now in huge demand.

Dreamforce 2011: too many attendees but Oracle is worried

Source: Mike Rosenbaum, VP Platform, Marketing and Operations

Dreamforce 2011 San Francisco attendees

• 44,000 registrations 
• 30,000 attendees 
• 2,700 C-level executives and Vice Presidents 

The crowds are staggering - really there are just too many people, which is negatively impacting the experience. However, the sheer volumes show the rise and rise of Salesforce as a company. 

The sessions are good and provide useful insights. 

Amazing to see Oracle outside on the street flying balloons to say they are number 1 for CRM. I would say this is a lead indicator that Oracle are worried about their future as they slip further behind the cloud leaders. 

Salesforce is really attracting the business community as the tech heads are being relegated to a minority group. Sanity at last as business takes ownership of technology.

 

Dreamforce 2011: 50%+ CRM is sub optimal because of data quality issues

According to industry analyst, Gartner Group, more than 50% of customer relationship management deployments will suffer limited acceptance, if not outright failure, due to lack of attention to data quality issues.

The impact of poor data quality is far reaching and its affects are both tangible and intangible. If data quality problems are allowed to persist, management grow to mistrust the information in the CRM and will be reluctant to use it for decision-making.

This evidence shows there is a growing need to have a more 'intelligent' implementation of CRM.

Intelligent CRM needs a combination of lead indicators, corporate gamification as a behavioural rewards system and a cultural change programme as a must have to drive high standards of CRM data quality.  

 

Dreamforce 2011 - Opportunity for Salesforce Alumni for Higher Education

The higher educational sector are looking for an alumni application in Salesforce. In particular, how to engage with past students that are executives as a source of expertise, mentors and fund raising.

Dreamforce Insights 2011: Higher Education Trends

This article covers some of the highlights for Higher Education made by Dave Thomas, Radian6, Director of Community and Social Strategy.

1. 98% of students  in the USA use a digital device and spend 101.93 minutes a day on Facebook. 
2. Students are the brand ambassadors and therefore social media measurements are key. 
3. Four Square the gamification market leader is being used for student orientation with the campus facilities and services. 
4. Social Graphics is becoming more widely used to rate the value of contributions of an individual within a social network. 
5. Students need to be encouraged of how best to use social media as many are naive in terms of long term implications. 
6. Emerging practice to develop a social media play book, which provides guides for stakeholders including how to deal with bad situations. 
7. Learning, education and empowering is the cyclical process that can be driven by social media measurements. 
8. Use social media to not 'reinvent the wheel'.
9. Build student life cycle which includes life time events. 
10. The Mayo Clinic is a good example of using social media and getting the balance right with confidential dialogue. 

Much of the above applies to business!

Dreamforce Insights 2011: Not for Profit Sector

Session run by Mark Dickey, SVP Enterprise, Salesforce Foundation

Salesforce Foundation is aimed at the Not for Profit sector. Higher Education is a high growth area with over 700 institutions. The Foundation is open to new ideas as Not for Profit is seen as a high growth area.

Gartner believe Cloud with Mobile and Collaboration key for driving value into this sector.

A major theme being pushed by Salesforce is 'Social, Mobile and Open'.

Major emphasis upon continuing education and extended learning.

Chatter, Collaboration and Community is key to the the Not for Profit sector. This is part of the messaging for the Social Enterprise.

Dreamforce 2011 San Francisco First Impressions

Today I registered at Dreamforce 2011 in San Francisco.

The registration process was very smooth with a blend of self-service and human agent.

Apparently, there are 40,000 delegates, which is their biggest to date.

Went to the pre conference  run by the Salesforce Foundation for Higher Education.  They were expecting a 100 delegates and 250 turned-up.

Looking forward to the week but is the event too big!! Mind you met one of my clients outside from the UK - small world!

Gamification Levels for high end employee engagement

This video shows the use of Levels in gamification http://iactionable.com/salesforce/

iActionable claim engaged employees are 43% more productive, generate 23% more revenue and are 87% less likely to leave by using gamification for high end employee engagement.

Use gamification to motivate the sales team

Bunchball is using Salesforce.com for gamification to improve sales people performance.

Bunchball has a family of gamification applications called Nitro Elements, built atop Nitro, its general purpose platform for adding game features to websites and applications. Nitro can be used in Salesforce that uses elements like competition, rewards, and rankings to influence behaviour.

The priority nowadays is the motivation of the sales team.

Salespeople are naturally competitive, and they will be motivated to play the game even harder, and have more fun doing it, given an easy way of seeing where they rank in the standings. Beyond individual competition, Nitro for Salesforce can rank teams of salespeople based on their collective performance.

In addition to closing deals, salespeople can get recognition for Chatter activity or other behaviours management wants to reinforce.

Gamification is a key element of Intelligent CRM. It needs to be linked with Lead Indicators and incentives to influence behaviour and share knowledge. We would expect this focus to grow rapidly in the next two years. 

IBM puts Artificial Intelligence in a Chip

IBM have created a micro-computer chip that has been designed to imitate the ability to understand surroundings, make sense of complicated data and respond to stimuli as they happen – characteristics that, until now, have only belonged to the living brain.

IBM said that they are a huge step toward allowing computers to “reason” instead of acting within the limits of their pre-programmed settings.  The chips are one of the first steps in a special project that has been dubbed SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics).

One of the chips is built around what amounts to over 260,000 programmable synapses while the other contains over 65,000 learning synapses.  IBM researchers have used this technology to build a “brain wall” at a lab in San Jose, California.  The long-term goal of this to develop a one-square-centimeter chip containing the equivalent of one million neurons and 10 billion synapses.

Artificial Intelligence’ DJ to Debut on HD2 Channel

Listeners can hear the program using the station’s stream or on an HD Radio receiver. Guile Lindroth and Guile 3D Studios developed the program to perform as a virtual assistant and help humans to do things like answer a land line phone,search the Web, check email, schedule appointments and run computer applications by voice.

“Denise” comes with a proprietary graphic engine, an English text-to-speech voice and a voice recognition engine. The program can “learn” the more the program interacts with you, the developer claims. The company characterizes Denise’ English as “natural,” as if you were “talking to a real person.” Lots of people in radio will be interested to hear if that’s the case.

Further details

http://tiny.cc/qgkqf