Regardless of their position on the Salesforce maturity curve, salesforce.com customers are recognizing the benefits of effectively governing their implementations. To achieve the full benefits of the cloud, organizations must re-examine their governance structures, policies, and processes to ensure they address the challenges of cloud-based application development, deployment, and ongoing innovation. 

As a yardstick, to optimize cloud applications ROI, the governance framework should support the fastest possible rollout of the newest functionality to the broadest base of users possible, so that the only limiting factor is the ability of users to absorb change. However, in reality, investments in governance must be justified through a solid business case that compares costs to returns and demonstrates a healthy ROI multiple—just like any other proposed business investment.

Bluewolf has developed a Cloud Governance ROI model. The model incorporates the six factors below and customer-specific factors to build a financial case demonstrating ROI. We are able to demonstrate an ROI of anywhere from 3x to 20x within a two or three-year horizon. Could I buy a $20 bill from you with the $1 bill in my wallet? Cloud governance delivers a healthy ROI and can be both modeled to underpin a business case for the investment.
 
The impact of cloud governance investment is seen in the following six ways:

1. Faster Release Cadence
   The earlier we put new application capabilities into the hands of end users, and train them to utilize them effectively, the earlier they can begin converting those capabilities into incremental revenue. An effective cloud governance framework allows organizations to make decisions faster, clarifies execution responsibilities, and delivers new functionality quickly through optimized and automated development and release processes.
2. Higher Quality
   New releases of applications which are bug-free, delivered on time, and on budget prevent costly downtime incidents and ensure that end users have access to the full set of application functions to serve your customers. Cloud governance ensures quality releases by instating best practice-based QA policies and processes, and automating key QA functions such as continuous integration and automated unit and functional testing. Go-live events are no longer dramatic: we already know the application we are deploying has passed 100% of tests, and we have practiced deployments many times before an actual production deployment.
3. Higher Adoption
   Our goal is to achieve 100% adoption of cloud applications in the target user base, and we continuously measure adoption (frequency as well as “breadth” and “depth” of application use) to understand whether and how closely we are achieving that goal. Through effective cloud governance, we build mechanisms for efficient Enhancements and New Feature Request Capture, prioritization, scheduling for (Agile) development, QA/test, and production deployment that put functionality in the users’ hands, as fast as they can absorb it. Increased responsiveness to user requests leads to increased application adoption and a virtuous cycle ensues.
4. Improved Productivity
   Streamlined and automated development, testing, and deployment functions, boosts the productivity of the teams that produce new application functionality. By implementing user requests for new or enhanced functionality faster, we boost the productivity of end users, allowing them to do more in less time—selling to more customers or servicing more customers.
5. Better Support
   Traditional on-premise application support organizations are typically centralized and optimized for efficiency and standardization, often at the expense of providing quick resolution of issues. By adopting best practice-based cloud application support structures and processes, we are able to dramatically improve support responsiveness and end-user self-sufficiency, leading to faster and more satisfying support outcomes.
6. Reduced Risk
   Applications need to be deployed into the cloud in a responsible manner and with full consideration of security, privacy, and integrity of your corporate data and business processes.  Salesforce.com’s cloud platforms—Force.com and Heroku—provide a solid foundation of services to protect corporate information. Cloud governance offers security recommendations to ensure that the applications deployed on these platforms are risk free. The impact is measured in either avoidance of direct financial impact or consequential financial impact arising from impacted customers or reputational harm.

 Contact us to schedule a cloud governance discovery session and put ROI numbers next to your efforts.