As the Director of Bluewolf’s Higher Education and Nonprofit practice, I interact with many Higher Education institutions that use Salesforce as a digital engagement toolset across separate sections of their constituent lifecycle. Typically, a university, college, or specific campus department will identify a business process need (e.g. Recruiting, Admissions, Student Services, Alumni Management, etc.) and purchase Salesforce as the technology to support that individual need.

After implementing Salesforce to solve this individual problem, the university  often sees the value of Salesforce as an institution-wide platform and eventually decides to shift their strategy toward an enterprise use. Making the leap from point solution to enterprise platform requires a lot of planning and decisions that affect all future use of Salesforce. What does it take to achieve success? Here are top four takeaways for Higher Education institutions considering using Salesforce as an enterprise platform.

Determine Business Outcomes

Offering heavily discounted licensing rates to Higher Education institutions, Salesforce makes it easy and relatively risk free for institutions to use the platform to solve their business problem. The challenge for many is determining the expected business outcomes, such as increasing alumni engagement or decreasing student attrition. What do they hope to achieve with Salesforce and how do they then measure success? I have seen schools rapidly and oftentimes randomly expand usage of Salesforce without any consideration around the reasons for this expansion. Staying focused on the original Salesforce value proposition will help Higher Education institutions grow their instance in a deliberate and orderly fashion.

Develop a Governance Structure

Once a Salesforce instance moves beyond a point-solution and begins to support multiple user groups and business operations, management of that instance becomes more complex. Since changes, updates, and additions to Salesforce now affect multiple user groups, strong governance is needed in order to provide a framework for the decision making process. This is typically done by creating a governance board, which consists of representatives from senior management, IT, and business users. The board then develops and maintains policies and protocols on the usage of Salesforce and is the voting body making final decisions on any changes or updates to the instance. This is a key transition point — often an institution can successfully work unfettered in a Salesforce instance when it is a point-solution because the number of users operating in Salesforce is small; however, without implementing a strong governance structure, it’s almost impossible to maintain Salesforce’s usefulness as an enterprise platform.

Implement a Master Data Management (MDM) Strategy

Data quality is a major determining factor of the usability and sustainability of a Salesforce instance. In my experience, Higher Education institutions think about data quality after implementation of Salesforce as a point-solution. Often that quality tends to be organically improved over time by trial and error during use. This approach typically doesn’t cause many operational issues when Salesforce has been implemented as a point-solution. This does cause serious business challenges when Salesforce moves to supporting a larger enterprise with multiple user groups across varying business operations. This is why it is extremely important for institutions to create and execute a master data management (MDM) strategy. MDM goes beyond data quality and involves enterprise data stewardship. Institutions have to make decisions around data access and control in these key areas:

• When using multiple systems, which should be treated as the “source of truth” when it comes to your data?
• Integrations and data flows
• Enterprise data warehousing
• Data taxonomy (i.e. does a high-value alum work at “JP Morgan” or “J.P. Morgan”?)
• Master data protocols (i.e. if there is a data conflict between two different business units, who wins?)

MDM is a challenging topic due to the often siloed operation of different parts of the institution. But without a robust MDM strategy, any effort to use Salesforce as an enterprise platform will be extremely challenging, if not impossible.

Develop a Continual Innovation Plan and Resource It Properly

Salesforce as a platform is highly flexible and extensible. Through a combination of declarative configuration, AppExchange products, and code development, Salesforce can be customized to solve any Higher Education business challenge. At the same time, this flexibility ensures that an institution’s Salesforce instance can stay at the cutting edge of technology and business relevancy. The ability to continually innovate on the platform to meet the growing needs of the enterprise is a huge advantage with Salesforce, but requires an institution to continually invest in that long term success. Key activities to facilitate that investment are: 

• Build a strong foundation of innovation which includes developing a long term Salesforce roadmap to guide that innovation.
• Implement a Center of Excellence (COE). A COE is typically a centralized organization of Salesforce and other IT experts which sits within the IT organization to provide both strategic advice and technical support for an institution’s salesforce infrastructure. Along with the Governance Board, the COE also develops and maintains the policies and procedures governing how Salesforce expands across the campus. 
• Build a knowledgeable Salesforce internal support team or work with a partner that has the talent and expertise to help fulfill all of these suggestions.

By following these best practices you’ll equip your organization with the structure needed to maintain and innovate on your Salesforce instance. The placement of these processes is what enables an institution to leverage Salesforce as an enterprise solution successfully. Those that budget for innovation, succeed.

If you’re ready to create a roadmap for your future Salesforce use or get support for your current instance, connect with our experts.