Email: jon@silvertreesystems.com

Call: (312) 283-4419

reasons to implement force.comacross your organization

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Why force.com ...................................................................................................................................Table of Contents ...............................................................................................................................The Times They Are a-Changin' .......................................................................................................The solution lies in empowering business users to build their own solutions ............................Force.com: The ultimate enabling platform .....................................................................................Top 10 reasons to implement Force.com across your organization .............................................

1. You need to deliver solutions faster .........................................................................................2. You need to eliminate data silos .............................................................................................3. You need a totally integrated social network .........................................................................4. You need a robust backend for your mobile apps ................................................................5. You need a way to entice Shadow IT into the light ................................................................6. You need to facilitate agility, productivity and innovation .....................................................7. You need to orchestrate apps across the organization ........................................................8. You need to exercise governance across the organization .................................................9. You need to modernize your legacy applications .................................................................10. You need to do all this with as little time and money as possible .......................................

Conclusion: It’s time to embrace force.com ....................................................................................Appendix: 5 key things to know about the Force.com platform ....................................................Further Reading ..................................................................................................................................

Copyright © 2012 SilverTree Systems. All rights reserved.

The need for IT responsiveness grows daily as product life cycles are shortened from years to months, and as the predictability of mass markets is replaced with the uncertainty of a global real-time economy and rapidly evolving consumer preferences.

Businesses have no choice but to buildapplications or enhance existing ones toleverage new (and ever-changing)technologies such as mobile and socialnetworking. As more and more work is being done outside the organization, specialized solutions need to be built to accommodate the unique needs of a wide variety of outside partners. With different kinds of customers looking for slightly different mixes of products and services, the ability to make money by being responsive to custom needsare exploding.

The huge opportunities opening up indeveloping countries (such as India, China, and across Africa) require a radically different mobile-driven approach to service and product delivery. Supporting systems need to be built to manage this increasing complexity of offerings - generic solutions won’t work.

All of this is on top of the already burgeoning backlog that exists in most organization. All of these applications require a focus on time-to-value and a never-ending process of being nimble, experimental, dynamic, and continuously iterating. This is in complete contrast to traditional IT, which is “project focused: do it and forget it.”It is obvious that there is no way for IT to succeed using traditional approaches.

Innovative companies need tools that fit their fast pace, their work-anywhere mentality, and their collaborative instincts.

“Unlike the technology revolutions of the 1990s and 2000s, this time around the basis of competition will be set by the companies that embrace and deploy digitization in the right places at the right time… The judgments thatcompanies make now will largely determine their relative competitive position for the foreseeable future.”

– The Next Wave of Digitization. Setting Your Direction, Building Your Capabilities, Booz & Company, 2011

IT will never have enough resources to address all these needs. And even if they did, the changing demographics in the workplace means that tech-savvy users, exploiting cloud computing, increasingly have the ability and desire to build their own solutions – without any or minimal IT involvement.

Many of the solution needed are in areas of the organization that are on the forefront ofcompetitive differentiation and innovation — where they support and retain customers and partners, minimize risk, and maximize profit.It is therefore critical for IT to provide a betterway to build these applications.

The only way to do this is to give employees the tools and support they need to serve themselves. “Self-service” does not mean turning business people into programmers. It means giving the right set of tools and support to the people closest to the problems, so they can build powerful software solutions on their own.The goal is to enable workers to quickly put together software solutions to solve specific problems, significantly reducing or even eliminating the time and coordination needed from IT.

If IT doesn't add value, business units will simply work around it, and that would lead to a much smaller and less impactful corporate IT resource. On the other hand, by working with users to provide them with an effective way to develop and deploy solutions, IT can greatly expand its reach and enhance its value.

This makes it possible to address areas that were previously unaffordable or of low priority for the IT department.

The potential benefits of harnessing the IT capabilities of users are enormous, and it is becoming more and more critical for thesuccess and very survival of the organization.

Force.com provides a set of building blocks that together form a powerful platform. The building blocks are designed to work together, each one enhancing the capability of the others, resulting in the whole being much greater than the sum of the parts. For example, the workflow building block can work directly with the database. Updates to the database can automatically be brought into the social conversation. Applications can be mobile-enabled with little additional effort. There is no need to deal with different logins, different user interfaces, or integration when using any of the building blocks.

Force.com provides the user with a ready-to-go system, and eliminates the time and effort that would be necessary to construct solutions from disparate vendors working together.

For example, one of the building blocks is the Force.com social network Chatter, which, with minimal effort, lets developers embed social

networking functionality into an application. Chatter-enabled applications let end users collaborate privately and securely by “following” each other, data records, and groups, and by sharing files and status updates. Rather than building and maintaining all this complex logic yourself in your applications, you simply use Chatter when you want to integrate social functions into any of your applications. Force.com provides a set of building blocks that together form a powerful platform for building business applications. The building blocks are designed to work together, each one enhancing the capability of the others, resulting in the whole being much greater than the sum of the parts.

Force.com provides organizations with aconsistent approach to applications, and the organization benefits from reuse across multiple projects - reuse of processes, technology, and people and their skills. The value of this increases rapidly over time.

In addition to eliminating the time and effort that would be necessary to construct solutions from disparate vendors working together, having a single platform provides many other benefits: licenses costs are spread across multiple applications; the database becomes more complete and reflective of the organization;a cadre of experts in the platform will emerge faster; and the organization can focus on providing everyone with the same training and support. Building and deploying small applications is accelerated if a common platform is used, because everyone can share the platforms database, authentication, permissions,workflows.

The ultimate goal is to provide a single platform that provides out-the-box functionality forbuilding typical business applications acrossthe enterprise.

reasons to implement Force.comacross your organization

With Force.com, there are no decisions to be made regarding what technology to use, there is no hardware to procure, and there is no software to install. Force.com provides unlimited computing power; guaranteed uptime and performance; automatic scaling and performance tuning; automatic backup and disaster recovery; a ready-to-go easy to manage database; roles and profiles for security and permissionmanagement; a point-and-click, easily modifiable workflow engine; a point-and-click report writer and dashboard builder; a social networking environment to facilitate real-time collaboration, recording, filtering, and rapid exception handling; and the ability to quickly build, deploy and manage mobile applications.

The building of an application can startimmediately without having to think about all the requirement detailed above. There is no need for a lengthy design phase, because much of the business logic can be built and changed,

without code, by a business analyst. The analyst can create the database, define validation rules, build the roles and profiles, develop the wizards, implement the workflows, write the reports, and build the dashboards – all without theinvolvement of IT.

All of these factors lead to a much faster time-to-market for your applications.

You need to deliver solutions faster

Force.com eliminates most of the vast array of actions that typically need to be taken to bringan application to life – and keep it healthy in a rapidly changing environment

1

Most user-developed applications are at the mercy of their underlying data sources.A “businessperson-friendly” database filled with reliable, complete, current and comprehensive data is therefore critical to their success.

Proliferating silos of data lead to significant time-wasting and error-prone engineering to combine or extract data using cut-and-paste or import/exports. Data is duplicated, often not current, and many times inaccurate. Aggregation and reporting across applications is difficult. Calculations and other business rules, as well as the type of user interaction taking place, are often not transparent to the rest of theorganization.

Providing a self-service Data Cloud will allow IT to control data accessibility and security, including filtering or masking data that end users should not have access to. Rules are enforcedautomatically by the database for every query, freeing developers from having to code data security logic into each application they write against the database.

Users can still create their own databases with just a few mouse clicks. They can then easily link their individual databases to existing data, thereby eliminating the need for data duplication. This also allows the Data Cloud to evolveorganically, based on actual need. In effect,the Data Cloud is “crowd sourced”.

By making data and services easily available to business developers, they will be less likely to access data sources in ways that are less secure and less accurate, and will do much to ensure that data silos don’t proliferate across the organization.

You need to eliminate data silos

Having a single source of truth that solution builders can use as a starting point reduces time to market,prevents errors, and guards against silos and redundant data.

2

Chatter is designed to bridge the gap between enterprise applications and the way people work. It does this by facilitating dynamic, informal, and shared communication across an expanding group of individuals. Chatter can be used as the conduit for moving information around the organization, facilitating approval processesand workflow, and effectively providingnotifications and reminders.

When solutions need to be assembled or changed on the fly, Chatter facilitates the rapid formation of small focused teams to build solutions, unimpeded by organizational boundaries. Developers, users and analysts can tap into the collective brain power of co-workers immediately, find expertise and advice, provide knowledge that carries far across theorganization, and get live feedback on planning, concepts and solutions.This substantially increases operational efficiency and optimizes the workforce.

Chatter is built into Force.com at every level: every application built on Force.com isautomatically Chatter-enabled. It allows workers to look up and use as a starting point a solution that was already developed by a colleague fora similar application.

Chatter also helps address one of the most vexing aspects of building applications: catering for exceptions. In many cases, instead of trying to anticipate every possible exception in the application, it often makes more sense to handle exceptions through Chatter. Chatter significantly reduces the amount of time wasted trying to identify the correct people required to help find an answer. The added advantage is that the resolution to these exceptions is automatically documented.

You need to improve collaborationacross the organization

With Chatter, the SalesForce.com enterprise social network, users can get help to develop solutionsfrom anyone anywhere in the organization.

3

Mobile devices will soon be the primarymechanism through which users conduct business.

A mobile-enabled enterprise opens up an exciting array of opportunities for businesses to improve the ways in which their workerscommunicate and collaborate, increaseefficiencies in common business tasks, and engage and interact with their customers more effectively. With mobility, organizations can instantaneouslypersonalize specific services used by customers, vendors, and employees, who can be individually identified and located through their mobile devices. Mobile canaccelerate business processes by providing a user experience that combines real-timeinteraction with relevant, accurate, and timely information. Mobility can introduce newbusiness processes altogether and obviatethe need for antiquated ones. Mobility brings everything together in a meaningful, relevant way and enables employees to work smarter and faster than ever before.

Going mobile is complex. Challenges include responding to ever-changing device technology and user trends; the ability to easily publish and distribute apps with flexibility and tight control;

the need to run apps with minimal disruption for all users and guarantee transactions in an occasionally connected environment, dealing with multiple potential security points-of-failure; the need to easily extend mobile apps to millions of users and transactions across the globe and the capability to manage applicationresponsiveness and network latency.

Mobile applications can be built quickly only if the backend and administration needs are already take care of, and the developer only has to function on the user interface. Therefore, a successful mobile strategy begins with a common platform for integrating and managing mobile devices and the corporate assets that are stored on them. Force.com enables companies to standardize on a common framework to ensure rapid deployment, consistent quality,and end-to-end security.

The services provided by Force.com shield the complexities of mobile from the enterprise, enabling developers to focus on quickly and easily delivering transformational mobile appsto customers, employees, and partners.

You need a robust backend foryour mobile apps

The ability to build, deploy and manage mobile apps will become a rapidly increasing needfor business developers.

4

Shadow IT is inevitably plagued by problems and missed opportunities. Governance isnon-existent, systems are inadequate and unsecured, and data silos spring up all over the place. The benefits from reuse across multiple projects - reuse of processes, technology, and people and their skills – are mostly unobtainable.

It is therefore critical to get as many users as possible on to the enabling platform.As experience has borne out, attempts to suppress Shadow IT won’t work, and neither will issuing edicts that everyone must get with sanctioned program. Enticement is the only alternative.

The first thing to do is to build credibility. This includes getting some quick wins on the board to engender confidence and conviction in the use of Force.com in your enterprise, and will give the skeptics pause.

Probably the most critical action to be taken is to turn yesterday’s gurus into todays evangelists. Employees who are experts in the current tools being used, like Notes and Access, are likely to feel threatened by the advent of new technology. Seek these employees out and turn them into Force.com experts as early as possible.

This way, instead of feeling threatened, they can use their expert status in yesterday’s tools to become Force.com evangelists.

The natural tendency will be for employees to want to stick to what they know. Therefore, you need to make it easy for employees to learn to use the platform. The establishment of a resource center early will help users feelconfident as they move forward. The availability of a self-service Data Cloud and social network will also be enticing. Departments that don’t immediately see the light will do so over time,as they start to see actual results.

You need a way to enticeShadow IT into the light

People naturally do things that are in their own best interest. It is therefore imperative that you make iteasy for them to do the right thing.

5

By generating a steady stream of savings and new revenues that may sometimes seem insignificant from one month to the next, as years go by they become analogous to the growth of capital over time due to the humble but powerful effects of compound interest. The profits generated this way can be thought of as the “agility dividend.”

Organizations can find hundreds of ways to make small, continuous adjustments and provide value-added services that will increase their profits and decrease their costs every day, every week, every month. Force.com can provide many of these enhancements with out-of-the-box, or near out-of-the-box functionality.Here are some examples:

Improve exception handlingException management through Chatter gives workers clear insight for handling exceptions; viewing and monitoring interactions andnecessary actions taken to resolve exceptions can lead to better implementation, revisions, or training on these systems, and increaseproductivity throughout the enterprise.

Improve decision makingThe platform can improve decision making by increasing the speed by which workers receive information through the use of Chatter; delivering the right information to the right person at the right time through workflow; provide shared, common access to the latest information at all times through a common enterprise database; automatically consolidate information from multiple sources in an enterprise database; isolate the specific information each worker needs so they don’t have to look for it and extract it themselves through task- and role-specific mobile apps; reduce errors by providing a central shared database to ensure everyone is working from the same data at all times; decrease miscommunication by increasing visibility into processes that impact the customer using Chatter.

You need to facilitate increased agility,productivity and innovation

One of the less obvious advantages of implementing an enabling platform is the wide range of continuousadjustments and enhancements to business operations it provides out-the-box.

6

Improve responsivenessMessages requesting action that languish in email boxes and on voice mail systems can be eliminated by implementing Chatter; the chance of things falling through the cracks can be lessened with workflow; improved visibility of commitments through Chatter helps ensure that business processes keep moving smoothly.

Facilitate innovationForce.com facilitates the kind of self-service, minimal startup, continuous trial-and-error experimentation necessary to discover what works and what doesn’t in manner that is low-cost and fast. Empowering users to experiment on their own leverages their deep understanding of their environment and the opportunities that can be pursued.

The ability to cope with disruption in an increasingly complex world opens up a significant competitive advantage. Source: “Business Mashups or Mashup Business?” Peter Evans-Greenwood, Capgemini.

The Agility Dividend

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Agility creates a competitive advantage

Instead of big-bang everything- and everyone-at-once implementations, the need now is to create large numbers of small services that can be rapidly orchestrated into selected processes, and equally quickly changed again. This allows solutions to be small, experimental, innovative, and locally relevant.

Workflow is a critical ingredient as we move from a single application for many users to many applications for just a few users. The applications and the people using them need to beorchestrated to accomplish larger goals.

Force.com includes a powerful set of tools to add workflow and business process orchestration to your applications. These include simple workflow rules, multi-person approval processes,sophisticated business processes that span multiple data sources and backend systems, and cross-functional work relay. Business users can design and deploy complex business processes on their own and adjust as quickly as their business changes. Developers can build new functions and capabilities by creating plug-ins that can extend the flow with new business services that act as integration points to other applications (e.g. SAP, Oracle Financials).

You need to orchestrate apps acrossthe organization7

In its simplest form, IT governance is about understanding IT and technology-related risks relative to the business processes that IT and technology support. For many organizations, there are areas of the company that thisunderstanding simply does not exist.

Business groups using third-party web servers without security and backup, applications exposing credit card information, and users ignoring compliance rules are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to company exposure. Proliferating silos of data that containcontaminated, inaccurate and out-of-date data are common. Calculations and other business rules, as well as the type of user interaction taking place, are often not transparent to the rest of the organization. There is no audit trail, and it is often difficult to prevent tampering without expending significant effort. Integration among multiple environments is complex and is usually not audited. There is no version control and change control. Licensing terms are frequently violated.

How do you get control? By providing a single platform, it becomes much easier to put controls in place, and most of these problems can be addressed effectively and efficiently – in one place. And it can be accomplished without hampering the efforts of users to get things done.

You need to exercise governanceacross the organization8

Enterprise level deployment of monolithicapplications is giving way to the assembly of small, granular, highly targeted services like checking flight arrivals, looking for contacts, tracking shipments, ordering spare parts, approving requests, or checking account balances. The objective is to provide simple features and functions with pre-populated data that make it as easy as possible for users to complete specific tasks.

So simply taking an existing application and moving it to the cloud is less than optimal. Translating the application into a hundred mobile screens with complex navigation schemes is also not going to work. Building small, on-demand, role-based appsthat allow users to use onlywhat applies to their particular situation is likely to bear more fruit. And because these applications often require a short time-to-market and ongoing modifications, they are better suited to business user development instead of IT.

The implementation of a Data Cloud provides the opportunity to allow legacy applications to take advantage of the enabling platform without having to go through a time-consuming and costly migration effort. Data synchronization can allow the legacy database to refresh the Data Cloud as needed. When data is updated in the Data Cloud, it can be synchronized with the legacy database. The legacy application can be re-built organically on Force.com in the new paradigm of small, orchestrated apps.

You need to modernize yourlegacy applications

Using Force.com, you can breathe new life into and unlock the data in legacy applications.

9

Force.com is a comprehensive, integrated, and powerful solution that can be implemented quickly and inexpensively.

Building and deploying applications isaccelerated when a common platform is used by as many people in the organization as possible, because everyone can share the platforms database, authentication,permissions, workflows, etc. By providing a consistent approach to applications, theorganization benefits from reuse acrossmultiple projects - reuse of processes,technology, and people and their skills.The value of this increases rapidly over time.

Other factors that limit the amount of resources that are needed include:

All the necessary functionality needed to build business applications is available as part of the platform – data, social, mobile, etc. This does much to obviate the need to look for tools outside the platform.

The functionality provided by the platform is designed to work together. This dramatically reduces the time required to build function-rich solutions, and eliminates the time and effort that would be necessary to construct solutions from disparate vendors.

This ability to create many solutions with little code makes the functionality of Force.com easily accessible to a broad range of non-professional developers, thereby broadening the number of people who can leverage the platform.

The platform provides simplified securitymanagement and permissions. Thiscombination makes it easier and lesstime-consuming to enforce enterprisesecurity and compliance.

You need to do all this withlimited resources

By implementing Force.com across the organization and by taking advantage of its fully integratedextensive functionality, you are able to get the maximum benefit for the least amount of time and money.

10

In an era when change arrives without warning and threatens to eradicate entire companies and industries overnight, organizations can survive and prosper only by engaging the minds and emotions of all employees, providing them with the right tools and encouraging them to use their initiative to adapt the organization to the changes buffeting it.

Once the enabling platform is in place, you can set your employees free. The result will be a peak-performing, robust and sustainable organization – based on the shared efforts of thoroughly empowered, energized, self-reliant employees working with the most powerful tool ever created!

Empowering individuals and teams to take responsibility for building solutions will produce the flywheel affect – each small push, taken together over time, can have an enormous impact through productivity gains, higher customer satisfaction, new businessopportunities, faster time to market andinnovation.

Conclusion: It’s time to embrace Force.com

“… organizations across industries [need] to seriously re-think not only how they are organized and operate, but also how information technology should be utilized to unlock innovation that enables greater operational efficiency and business effectiveness. – “The Future of Work Has Arrived: Time to Re-Focus IT,” Cognizant, February 2011

1Clicks and Code work togetherIt will remain true that it will often require some amount of coding to complete a robust application. Therefore, it must be easy for IT and business developers to work together collaboratively to achieve their goals. What’ s different is that the Force.com platform provides the ability for users, analysts and developers to actively participate in building of an application. The key is that in Force.com, each role owns its own part of the solution. Force.com manages the contract between parties to ensure neither side can break the other’s work. The result is that both are free to be agile in how they work together. This makes it much easier for the two groups to work together collaboratively to achieve their goals.

2No app is left behindForce.com continuously delivers the latest advances in technology (e.g., social networking and mobile) automatically – three times a year. When new functionality is provided by the platform, all the applications already built on the platform automatically and immediately inherit that functionality without doing anything. Previously built custom development is unaffected by system upgrades. This eliminates any concern about an application being on an older version of the software, or not being able to take advantage of new technology.

5Participation can be encouraged with work.comA critical success factor is the amount of participation and collaboration by the users. Therefore, the ability to encourage contributions, encourage all levels of participation, reward contributions, and make value explicit is critical to the success of citizen developers. These factors are well supported by the Salesforce application work.com, thereby making work.com a valuable addition to any Force.com implementation.

3Pre-tested architecture means less testing and faster deliveryForce.com goes way beyond simply speeding up the development process. It has already built and tested the production environment, including database, database connectivity, application server, security protocols, and other application infrastructure items such as load balancing, scalability and performance, so developers will have to make far fewer technology strategy decisions and spend a lot less time on testing before moving to production.

4The capabilities of the platform are easily extendedWhile a substantial percentage of a Force.com application can be built without coding, by simply using the powerful Force.com point-and-clickcapability, you won’t hit a wall when you want to build a complex enterprise app that scales to thousands of users. If you find the platform is missing a piece of the puzzle (i.e. does not have the functionality you require for your application), you can fill it in with solutions from the Appexchange or build whatever you need yourself or with a partner. The Force.com API’s make this seamless.

Appendix: 5 key things to know about the Force.com platformThe following key factors are often overlooked when evaluating Force.com:

Further reading available at UnleashForce.com.

Email: jon@silvertreesystems.com Call: (312) 283-4419