Building the Business Case for Salesforce DevOps

If your organization has just made a multimillion-dollar investment in the Salesforce platform, company leaders may assume they’ve done all they need to create digital transformation. In fact, while Salesforce lays the groundwork for streamlining development and turbocharging innovation, a disciplined DevOps solution is key to making the most of your investment and driving effective change. You may understand intuitively why bringing DevOps into your Salesforce implementation is important, but you’ll need to outline the business case in order to convince decisionmakers. That means drilling down to the right metrics and ROI model that can communicate value to executive stakeholders.

Laying The Foundation with Salesforce

There’s a reason so many enterprises choose Salesforce as the bedrock of their digital disruption strategy. Salesforce allows companies to build and deploy applications five times faster than traditional software development platforms, and at half the cost. According to TK, Salesforce leads to major improvements in development speed, including increases of around 20% in time to market, company growth, and process efficiency. Many of these gains stem from the platform enabling administrators to innovate and customize without having to write a ton of code. At the same time, Salesforce reduces operational costs, IT spending and IT maintenance by more than 15% thanks to the elimination of hardware and associated infrastructure costs. Still, Salesforce alone is not enough for most companies seeking to compete in today’s digital economy.

The Role of Salesforce DevOps

A DevOps solution is necessary for enterprises to take the power of Salesforce to the next level. The platform does not contain a source repository for developers and other IT professionals to store their work, nor is there a structured release process. As a result, users frequently write conflicting code or override the work of others, leading to a massive version control issue. The process of delivering releases can become complex, inefficient — and expensive. Plus there is no way to tie releases to a structured compliance process, opening your organization up to privacy and security risks.

Through a seamlessly integrated DevOps solution, Salesforce users in your company can achieve a higher level of velocity and discipline, as well as drive innovation in a more structured and measurable way: You can build applications based on agile planning and automate the testing process. You can increase the speed of releases into the market. You can monitor and manage releases, including compliance checks, in real-time. And you can do all of this in a closed-circuit feedback loop that ties back to your agile plan. As a whole, DevOps can increase the speed of releases far beyond Salesforce alone, while driving down production errors that introduce compliance risks and security gaps into your implementations. These benefits can underpin a strong business case.

Communicating ROI

Building an effective business case means developing an economic model that highlights how DevOps can help your enterprise maximize returns on its Salesforce investment. Analyzing ROI involves answering two main sets of questions:

First, examine the potential value DevOps can deliver once you can rapidly test the effectiveness of a new idea in the market to see if it achieved the intended business value.

Success Metrics for Innovation Velocity

At the end of the day, executives want to see numbers. One key set of metrics to drill down into has to do with the speed of innovation. With the velocity of digital business accelerating at unprecedented rates, enterprises will need to adapt to the market at a daily or even hourly rate. Companies today have to think of a digital strategy not as a monolithic entity that they drop on the market and revisit periodically; rather, it’s something they must constantly evolve and adapt in response to market demands and the moves of competitors. When it comes to speed, a DevOps solution can drive measurable gains.

Source link: https://copado.com/2019/11/building-the-business-case-for-salesforce-devops/