We’ve all seen the demonstrations by companies like salesforce.com (SFDC) showing how easy it is to create CRM solutions in the cloud. And believe me, it is easy… to a certain extend. Create custom applications on the force.com platform within hours. Create custom objects within minutes. Create fields within seconds… It’s all true. The power and ease of use of SFDC is stunning.

I’ve been working over 1,5 years with SFDC… And you can create solutions within days. So… did I create like tons of solutions? No. I barely even touch the system. SFDC made it easy as taking candy from a baby to create solutions, but how about the people needing to use the technology (in a harmonized manner)?

The company where I work uses SFDC, but the business models in the countries are all very different. Every sales manager, of every country, of every business unit does its own stuff in excel, Microsoft access, you name it. Everyone determines what is needed for their processes to run smoothly. 

So clicking some buttons in SFDC will not make the CRM solution to be a success in all those countries. It will not be able to replace all the excel sheets (unless you want utter chaos in the system which is not maintainable anymore). Simply put: the technology will not be able to do the change management for you.  

The time needed to build the application was a couple of percent versus all the time I spent on talking to people, explaining, gathering new requests, explaining again, aligning with the overall architectural blueprint to implement changes (making sure interfaces don’t break down when adding a field) and so on.

The solution for these complex matters: don’t be as flexible as SFDC allows you to be. Think before building.

1. What is the purpose of the system (do you want to replace all excel sheets, or do you want to enable users to work with generic capabilities that you can roll-out fast) = Define Vision & Scope
2. Define the IT landscape (account master from SAP, people master from Peoplesoft, account teams from sales structure, SFDC mobile for mobility, territory management for security and BI reporting…)
3. Define a work methodology (test and train environments, data steward policies, release/change management…)
4. Define the generic capabilities together with key business specialists (what is the cross business unit need on contact management, report needs, using websites and tracking leads…)
5. Building and deploying  according to the work methodology
6. Support the solutions and innovate the generic capabilities
   

You see that building the application is not the major work (when using on premise software, it might be). The major work is the alignment, the governance structures… the communication with a lot of people. Sure, SFDC is a great piece of non-software, and it enables fast solutions, but the technology can’t help us with the real complex stuff slowing us down… humans.