CIO - By now, most organizations have used some sort of a SaaS application, so there's familiarity with the basics of hosted software. But CRM applications are by their nature much more likely to be integrated with other business-critical applications, either behind your firewall or in hosted data centers, so they present some new challenges. Furthermore, applications with really rich web-services APIs (such as Salesforce CRM) can surface operational, policy, and process issues in your IT organization.
Given all this change, where should you as CIO concentrate after rollout? Here's some practical advice. While much of this article applies to any SaaS CRM system, we've focused here on the specifics of Salesforce.com.
1. IT Team's Level of Engagement
In many early parts of a Salesforce CRM project, there isn't that much for many parts of the IT team to actually do. Typically, configuration and rollout is done by consultants or staff within the user departments, and over time they become fairly self-supporting. Even though your team won't deploy much in the first year, there are important roles for them to fill, including: oversight for security, policy enforcement, and asset protection; guidance on architectural issues and ramifications of decisions; and access to data in other systems, for migration or integration.
After the first year, however, your team is likely to become more involved, particularly if the system is a big success. There will be demands to extend the application's footprint (particularly towards your web site) and internal integration (generally in the direction of engineering's support system and finance's order management and accounting packages). This is natural as the users start working with the system as a full fledged CRM system, rather than just an SFA tool.
2. Integration and Extension
The biggest effort related to a new SaaS CRM system won't be implementation or customization: it'll be data and integration. The basics of integration, or hooking up the "pipes," is often straightforward. Available integration connectors and a rich set of web services APIs make Salesforce.com very easy to integrate with other applications.
But getting the data semantics and transactional context right will involve serious thinking and some amount of data rework. As with any complex system, integration exposes data problems that were hidden or tolerable in siloed operation. Don't be surprised if cleaning up data and integrating with your existing systems costs more than your first-year license fees.
3. Performance and Business Continuity
In many respects, with a SaaS CRM system, the vendor is ultimately responsible for delivering on the SLA. Salesforce.com has a very good record indeed of operational continuity, and the company provides several weeks' notice for planned downtime. Most of the time, their servers respond to user interactions within 250 milliseconds, and they publish real time performance and continuity statistics on their web site.
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