There is a saying in audio recording which has become a bit of a cliched pun:
“We’ll fix it in the mix.”
If anyone has ever spent time in a recording studio you have probably heard this. The advent of digital music production has made it much easier to fix mistakes during the mixing/editing process, making it arguable to skip another take and “fix it in the mix”. As a musical hobbyist, I have been part of several late night sessions where that term was thrown around jokingly for mistakes that clearly should be corrected through another take versus trying to edit them later. And after the chuckling subsides, we drag ourselves out of the control room, pick up our respective instruments and have at it one more time…
As I am sure every industry has its own similar term to reference work that is pushed off later that should probably be addressed now, there is a common saying I hear on software projects:
“It’s a training issue.”
This saying often refers to usability issues that are reported as Change Requests. For various reasons these Change Requests are not addressed as software changes but instead “Training Points” for the users to modify their behavior. The negative slant is this implies it’s OK to ask a user to change their behavior, rather than change the software to meet their “needs”.
While this thinking holds merit when custom developing an application, I disagree in terms of a customizable multi-tenant software like salesforce.com that is leveraged by the masses. Let’s look at the Microsoft Office suite of products. MS Office changed the way business works. And it didn’t do it by providing a unique experience for every type of industry and client. It dictated a set of best practices (right or wrong) that can be leveraged across the globe regardless of industry or department. While new features may not have always been intuitive, businesses realized there is a significant cost savings to not creating their own version of a word processor or spreadsheet application, or presentation maker. Rather, they should make the investment to learn how to leverage one that was created for the masses. One could argue that organizations often bettered their processes due to pre-designed functionality that was available to them that they may have not considered applicable to their work or industry.
The difference between Salesforce.com and Microsoft Office is that Office is a product, while Salesforce is a platform with product offerings. In addition to marketing, salesforce automation and customer service and support, the platform can be leveraged to apply a rich set of features and functionality to other areas of the business (recruiting, employee development, operations, etc…). You can custom configure and even custom develop on the platform to create unique applications.
One of the areas we work with clients is helping them navigate the myriad of choices they have when designing applications on this platform. When is it ok to “customize” and when should one leverage what is already available but only requires simple configuration? Here is where the rubber meets the road. Working on this platform, I have seen many clients realize the benefits of modifying their process or behaviors for enhanced visibility, streamlined work streams, or improved collaboration. Salesforce’s native page layout editor often accelerates design decision making, creates a repeatable, familiar interface, and introduces visual tools that may not have been utilized before and would not have been requested by the client. While change can be painful, the benefits can often outweigh the investments.
For this reason, businesses should always make sure they are making the proper investment in Training and organizational Change Management. Regardless of the size of your organization, Training and Change Management can consume a significant portion of any software budget, and that percentage only increases on a platform that reduces the amount of development time needed.
So next time you hear “it’s a training issue” on your salesforce.com project, try not to immediately cringe, chuckle or push back. It may very well be an opportunity to improve…and an appropriate time to “fix it in the mix.”
What more noble cause is there to be leading your company in? Salesforce.com (SFDC) has changed the way people and companies interact with software. The Salesforce.com platform is not just software hosted in the cloud, but has become a platform for companies and individuals to design their own software that integrates with their core CRM quickly and cost effectively.
Need a place to track expenses against your prospects and clients? Salesforce.
Want to monitor your office technology assets? Salesforce.
Need to track order fulfillment?
Salesforce!
Why Has This Platform Been So Successful?
The lack of need to manage hardware and scalability coupled with the highly intuitive Admin GUI has empowered business people to meet their own needs without constant dependency on technical resources. Which me brings me to my next point.
Salesforce is Not Difficult to Administer
Oh my gosh! He said it! Shhh! Don't tell anyone!
That's right, it's not difficult to setup and make changes to your SFDC environment thanks to SFDC's "declarative" configuration wizard. And while certified Admins are scarce right now, that won't be the case forever as it does not require programming experience to become one. Then if becoming an SFDC Admin is so easy and popular right now, how does one differentiate themselves in an ecosystem that is growing leaps and bounds and may be as saturated as .Net developers in a couple years?
Simple. Let's look back at why SFDC took off in the first place. It targeted business people with small departmental budgets and showed them they could deploy their own system without taking a programming class, or requiring a cap ex request. Why is this important? Because thebusiness knows what they want when they want it. When the business has to go through an exhaustive process to get it, it gets frustrated, loses interest or worse, ends up with a very expensive system that does not meet its needs nor grow with change.
Make Yourself Valuable
I have an uncle who once told me "the people who knowhowwill always work for the people who knowwhy".
Throughout my career these words have echoed in my mind. If you were one of the first adopters of SFDC, it answered a need you already knew you had. Understanding how to configure the tool was the next step to meet that need. If you are new to SFDC but not technology, or you are just starting your career out of school, then you may be tempted to immerse yourself in the features of the platform, learning as much as you can and building your list of certifications. And while this is empowering, it is not valuable to employers…on its own.
What is valuable is knowing their business. Know their competitors. Understand the market landscape. Talk with the business and spend time with them understanding their jobs, not just the mechanics, but also the objectives. What are they measured by? What market forces are they planning for? What is their short term/long term vision for the platform?
Then, apply the knowledge you have gained of the platform, and how other SFDC clients use the system, to guide the business in its use of SFDC as a tool to meet those needs. Understand their requirements and challenge things they ask for. Ask why they want that field, or that workflow, or that validation rule. Offer alternative solutions or thinking. Leverage the platform to facilitate improvements to their process. Leverage your business acumen to consult them on ways to improve their use of technology, not migrate flawed methods to a new technology.
A prominent client in the insurance industry recently posed a question. They asked "how can we share an Account record with someone, but not give them access to all the Contact records for that Account?" As a capable Admin, I might be tempted to start working on a solution to their request, but I stopped myself. Instead, I inquired why they would want to do this in the first place. It's counter intuitive to the goals and objectives of this platform they shared with me when we first started working together, which was to foster collaboration and cross-selling. Removing visibility to key contacts at an Account record would certainly not foster collaboration and cross-selling. Spending time and money on determining a way to meet their request, while potentially showing off my admin skills, would only jeopardize their strategy for the system's usage.
How and Why
While so many industries are waiting out the current economic environment, Cloud Computing is growing exponentially. Admins and Developers are in high demand. Salesforce consultants are needed even more. Because despite what is offered by the latest technology trends, we should be stewards of best practices and innovative thinking. We should not be afraid to ask questions. We should not be afraid to disrupt current thought or culture. While not all of our suggestions will be embraced, it is our responsibility to make sure they are heard. For these behaviors will make you distinguished in your career.
Because while it is good to know how, we should always be striving to know why.
I was meaning to write this blog in March 2012, one year after ditching my laptop and moving to the iPad2 for daily business use. With the passing of the amazing, iconic, heroic, innovative (stick in your adjective) Steve Jobs, now seems like a good day to accelerate the timeline and get my thoughts out there. When I walked into work this past Wednesday morning, our COO had placed a huge picture of Steve in the office inside a 10 foot tall iPad 2 frame we have. It wasn't the picture from his biography that is everywhere now, it was the one of him in his younger days holding a Mac in his lap as he's sitting on the floor. I definitely got emotional seeing it and it was really interesting to see the same reaction from almost everyone who walked into the office and looked at the huge picture of Steve that they weren't expecting to see. We're all obsessed with Apple and Jobs of course…
As the “mobile guys” within the salesforce.com world (as we are frequently called) we worship Apple and Jobs and all their products. The fact that we are a 100% Apple shop is one of the keys to our branding and culture and has been a huge help from a retention and recruiting perspective. It also makes us look far more innovative than competitors when we walk into a client with shiny white iPads and they walk in with dusty old Dells… When the iPad 2 launched, I figured it was time to see if I could ditch the laptop and go 100% iPad. It's been enormously successful while forcing me to change some habits as well. It's not quite possible to do so completely… here's what I've learned along the way, sectioned out by core needs:
- Email
Email is great on the iPad, I find it easier to use than on a laptop. We use Gmail and the standard mail client on the iPad presents it perfectly. You can also open up the Gmail web client and use that as well, but I find the experience far less efficient. Sometimes search doesn't work well on the iPad email app, so I do sometimes go to the Gmail web client to search and find things. Same with Exchange. For those using Outlook, it is fantastic on the core iPad email client.
- Typing
A keyboard is a must. Either of the two Zagg keyboards I find the best (roughly $100 on Amazon). New keyboards are of course coming out all the time, hopefully they'll beat out the Zagg and force Zagg to continue to innovate. The first Zagg keyboard that is marketed by Logitech is a nice silver case that sits on top of the iPad 2. It is very light, the keyboard is good, although not great, it's pretty cramped for typing. Zagg has since come out with the Zaggfolio for iPad 2. The keyboard is phenomenal, I'm using it now to type this entry, but it does weigh a bit. For traveling, the first Zagg could arguably be better due to the weight difference, depends how much you need to type. In general, trying to use the iPad2 digital keyboard I find to be painful. Buying the Zagg keyboard changed everything for me. I type fast and just can't do it on the digital keyboard. Now I'm used to the compressed Zagg keyboards. When I go back to a MacBook Pro 13 with a larger keyboard, it seems huge and uncomfortable. I've also tried the pens with the iPad 2. Some people at the company use them along with an app called "NotesPlus" or various others. I'm just not fast enough with the pen though. Some people do like it.
- Note taking
Awesome on the iPad. Evernote is a great application, it's great to have all my notes on my iPad 2 and also available on my iPhone and via the web as needed. There might be other apps that do the same thing, Evernote isn't fancy, but it works great.
- To Dos
Wunderlist is a great application for tracking To Dos. Like Evernote, it's available on your iPhone as well as the web. Separating To Dos away from general notes in Evernote has been really efficient for me. I create various categories such as "Work, Personal, etc."
- PowerPoint/Keynote and Excel/Numbers:
Our company analyst who puts together tons of presentations and excel docs is super annoyed with me since I began this experiment, even though he never admits it or shows it. I used to be an expert in Excel and PowerPoint and do a lot of stuff myself. Now if I want to change something, I'm pretty much incapable of doing so. I'll send him emails that say things like "Can you change cell C18 to the following on the Excel doc?" and "On the Keynote, can you adjust slide 6 to say…" Content creation in Excel and Powerpoint/Keynote is pretty much impossible except for the most basic use cases. We do some pretty serious Excel stuff and have cool Keynote presentations with all sorts of cool pictures and stuff flying around the screen. Not going to happen with the iPad 2 from an authoring perspective. Editing is OK and should get a lot better over time. If you need to author a lot of stuff, it must be done on a laptop or have a great analyst like we do to work with.
- Instant messaging
Skype finally released an iPad client a couple of months ago, which was huge. Before doing so, I had to use a variety of clones that hooked to Skype, none of which functioned well.
- Live meetings
We use GoToMeeting and their app works well on the iPad. You can't host meetings though, only watch meetings, which is a big issue sometimes and one of the reasons you might have to go back to your Mac. There are a few applications like ZigZag that allow you to share your screen, but it's not the full view of the iPad, it only allows sharing of a whiteboard application like ZigZag (which is a great application for white boarding).
- Content sharing
Dropbox is the leader and works well. I can post files from my laptop or from my iPad and view them on either. There are lots of clones to Dropbox, but might as well stick with the leader.
- Opening up files sent to you via email
This can be a bit frustrating. If anyone has any ideas on ways to do this better, please let me know. Depending on what type of file is sent to you, you can easily open them up on the iPad and view them, but each file type pretty much gets opened within a separate application. So going back to find already opened files is difficult. As an example, PDFs I open up in iBooks, Word documents I open up in Pages. Powerpoints and Keynotes I open up in Keynote. There are some apps like QuickOffice that can open up multiple file types within the same application, but I find I like the specific application that is meant for each file type a little bit better than using a general app like QuickOffice.
- Booking Travel
Kayak's iPad app is amazing and crushes any travel site on a laptop, including Kayak's.
- FaceTime
Amazing application, wish you could show the iPad 2 screen somehow as well… See comments on GoToMeeting up above…
- Collaboration
We use salesforce.com's Chatter application of course. It's awesome on the iPad.
- Calendars
A little complex on the iPad 2, although it works well. I have Gmail hooked to the primary iPad 2 calendar application. This works great to view calendar events and create them if I don't need to invite anyone else or book a room. To invite others and book rooms, I have saved two versions of the Gmail web client calendar as separate apps. The first is the mobile view of Gmail calendar and the second is the desktop view. The mobile view is great for viewing one specific day at a time, but I still can't book rooms on it and it's more difficult to invite others to it (but is possible). The desktop view allows booking rooms and easily inviting others and seeing their calendars. There is a negative to this view in that you can't scroll up and down through a specific date to all hours though, it gets stuck in a six hour band around your current time.
- Remote Desktop Apps
I don't use these just as I find them too difficult to use and you have to leave your laptop open and connected to the web back at your office or wherever. I find it easier if I need to access a file or something on my laptop to just open up my laptop. I got the 11 inch Air, so I can travel with both that and the iPad2 and it's still not too heavy. It would be nice to travel with just the iPad, but that last 10% of usage is still a challenge. Day trips I just bring the iPad. Anything longer I take the crutch of the Air with me…
- salesforce.com
Salesforce has a great dashboard app now available for iPad 2 in addition to the Chatter application that is awesome. We build all sorts of amazing custom iPad 2 apps (native and HTML5) that leverage Salesforce, but our apps are a conversation for another day. Salesforce and the iPad 2 definitely go great together. Soon Touch.Salesforce.com will launch which is an HTML5 application for core use of the app on the iPad. We’ve only seen demos so far, but it will be awesome. Major props to the team over at Salesforce that I know is working hard on this.
- Presenting from the iPad
Buying a dongle enables full screen sharing to a projector. I find this works well, but I don't find it to be as reliable as presenting from a laptop. Sometimes the dongle pops out of the iPad a bit, especially when switching between vertical and horizontal views if you need to do so. Keynote and Powerpoint also run a little bit slower on the iPad, so transitions you might have created on a laptop might come across as a little slow. If you're going to present from the iPad, definitely create transitions specifically for the iPad, not all are supported. That being said, it does wow people when you present directly from the iPad, just take into account the risk factor involved with speed and the dongle. Presenting from iBooks also works well. We sometimes just fly through presentations that are PDFs and placed in iBooks. It doesn't have the wow factor of Keynote and the cool transitions, but it's low risk and works and is fast. Of course presenting to a small group or 1 on 1 without a projector is fantastic from the iPad and far better than a laptop as it’s so easy to share with others and there is no wait time to start, etc.
- Signing documents
This is great on the iPad, far superior to a laptop. Applications like Sign N Send enable you to pull up a PDF, zoom in on the signature line, sign it with your finger, and email it to yourself and then you can forward it on to whomever. Way easier than printing, signing, faxing or scanning, etc.
Anyway, hope this post was interesting!! Definitely make the switch and ditch daily use of the laptop, you can survive in most cases without it and it just looks cool to walk into a meeting and pop out the iPad… everyone loves to talk about it. Hopefully that last 10% where the laptop is needed will be solved somehow by future enhancements to the iPad and associated apps. I don't believe that's really soon though… Good luck with the switch! In honor of Jobs, let’s all make it happen.
Everyone is talking at mobile today, but few people know where to start, or where to turn for help in talking about how to take key business processes to a mobile device. We have been working in and around mobile technology for over four years and have always focused on how cloud and mobility intersect to meet a client needs.
We have made Cross-platform mobile development a core focus so it is possible to have a single code base and have the same application run across multiple form factors on multiple mobile operating systems built by multiple manufacturers. Why is this important? Many companies do not have the luxury of rolling out an application for only one mobile device, they usually need to support multiple devices which can make mobile application development more costly and to increase project risk exponentially.
Before we get into the details of what is supported and how this is possible, here is a brief video that outlines what the 2GO Platform is at the highest level.
True Cross-Platform Customizable Applications
When the iPad was introduced many people labeled it as a device looking for a need. Today it is clearly leading the tablet charge in the Enterprise and has been so successful for Apple it is even taking some marketshare from Apple's laptop sales. However as more tablets come to market, many companies are also looking at Android options to lower costs or at the RIM Playbook.
The platform is optimized for tablets and is designed from the ground up to be used with a touch interface. We now have tablet support for the following customizalbe applications:
Account and Contact Management
Call Planning/Call Reporting
Order Entry
Digital Sales Aid
Route Planning
Field Service
Inventory Management
Bar Code Scanning
Signature Capture
Social Enterprise (Salesforce.com Chatter)
Cloud access even when you can't access the Cloud
What I'm really proud of is the fact that 2GO provides access to back-end cloud data whether or not you have internet connectivity. Even in this day and age there are many places where we don't have connectivity (basements, office buildings, remote customer sites) and still need access to critical business information. Offline synchronization is core to the platform and all information is stored locally in an encrypted database to provide safe and secure access to key information regardless of internet connectivity.
Simplifies Maintenance
Applications rarely are static, business processes evolve and it is a struggle for most mobile applications to keep up with the speed of business. The 2GO Platform helps applications to easily grow and change without any code changes. It leverages something called meta-data (data about data) to make this magic happen. What this means to a business user is when they add a field to a back-end Cloud application, that field is immediately accessible in their 2GO mobile application.
Cross-platform Tablet2GO running on multiple tablets
Here is a brief video that shows the Accounts, Contacts and Social Enterprise modules running on an Apple iPad, a Motorola Xoom and a RIM Playbook.
One of the most popular applications we have delivered is using a tablet as a Digital Sales Aid. Essentially using a tablet as a replacement for a paper brochure, or one-sheet and presenting content about products and services in a very engaging way.
Cross-Platform Digital Sales Aid
Here is an example of the Digital Sales Aid application configured for the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) vertical that shows products on a virtual store shelf.
Cross-Platform Tablet2GO on an iPad
Here is a brief video showing how Tablet2GO looks and feels on an iPad
Cross-Platform Tablet2GO on an RIM Playbook (running QNX)
Here is a brief video showing how Tablet2GO looks and feels on a Playbook
Cross-Platform Tablet2GO on a Motorola Xoom (running Honeycomb)
Here is a brief video showing how Tablet2GO looks and feels on a Xoom
The above videos showed 2GO running on a variety of tablets with the same codebase. However we haven't forgotten about the original mobile form-factor, the smartphone. The same codebase is smart enough to know whether or not it is running on a tablet or a smartphone and the user interface is adjusted accordingly.
Here is an example of 2GO running on a Motorola Droid. This is the same application that was shown in the tablet videos, however the interface is optimized for the smartphone (one column of data instead of two, and more of a wizard like interface).
The mobile team is still hard at work and there is more to come. I will keep you posted on our progress as we make a few more announcements in the coming weeks that will make it even easier for you to access these and other 2GO applications and easily roll them out to your organization.
Model Metrics receives the highest score possible for client satisfaction; also receives its highest scores for its implementation life cycle, vertical expertise, key partnerships and go to market strategy
CHICAGO – May 23, 2011 – Model Metrics, the leader in cloud computing services for the enterprise, today announced it is cited as a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave: Salesforce.com Implementation, Q2 2011 (May 13, 2011). In this evaluation of leading service providers for complex, enterprise-wide salesforce.com initiatives, Model Metrics received its highest scores for client satisfaction, implementation life cycle, vertical expertise, key partnerships and go to market strategy.
The report evaluated 11 salesforce.com implementation service providers with more than $10 million in revenue associated with salesforce.com projects, more than 50 consultants, and breadth of capabilities from process expertise to technical programming skill. The report focused specifically on the needs of larger, more complex salesforce.com deployments, often global in scope, large in scale, or complex in terms of integrations and customization.
According to the report:
Model Metrics was noted for developing its 2GO Cloud solutions, which enable Salesforce and other cloud solutions on mobile devices, as well as its concentration of client experience in financial services, life sciences, healthcare, and CPG/retail industries.
“It (Model Metrics) is an excellent choice for firms that are seeking a more nimble, flexible partner that is highly dedicated to SFDC (salesforce.com).”
Model Metrics, eight years of expertise in the clouds
Recognized for its expertise with custom, mobile, and multi-cloud deployments, Model Metrics has 100,000+ mobile application users and has completed over 1,500 cloud computing implementations for mid-sized and Fortune 1000 companies.
Today Model Metrics is the go to service provider for enterprises looking to deliver the power of cloud computing on the latest tablet and smartphone devices. Its expertise at the intersection of cloud computing and mobility enables businesses to not only discover the productivity of conducting business transactions on the road, but also to gain competitive advantage by mobilizing the cloud.
Comments on the news:
“We feel our placement on this Forrester Wave focused on large and complex enterprise-wide salesforce.com implementations is a testament to our early commitment to the cloud and the expertise we’ve developed over the past eight years with custom, mobile and multi-cloud deployments,” said Adam Caplan, CEO of Model Metrics. “With over 1,500 cloud implementations under our belts, we’re at the cutting edge of making the cloud work for enterprises.”
About Model Metrics
Model Metrics, enabler of the Model Enterprise, delivers solutions and services at the cutting edge of the cloud computing industry. Since its founding in 2003, Model Metrics has become one of the most diversified and respected partners of salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services, Adobe, and Google. Headquartered in Chicago with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Detroit, and Minneapolis, Model Metrics’ customerbase spans all industries and includes enterprises such as Abbott, Allergan, Aon, Honeywell, L'Oreal, MasterCard, Medtronic, NBC Universal, The Boeing Company and Walgreens.
With a focus on mobile and call center technology, business process and change management innovation, and custom development, Model Metrics has completed 1,500+ salesforce.com implementations for mid-sized and Fortune 1000 companies. Its world-class application development skills using Force.com, Adobe Flex and AIR, Amazon Web Services, Google and the Applei Phone and iPad enable the creation of custom applications featuring multimedia-rich user experiences.
CHICAGO – May 19, 2011 – Model Metrics, the leader in cloud computing services for the enterprise, today announced it has been selected as a Finalist for Red Herring's Top 100 North America award, a prestigious list honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from the North American business region.
The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds across North America. The nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria including: financial performance, technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, execution of strategy and integration into their respective industries. This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record and standing of a company, which allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.
The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony the evening of June 15th at the Red Herring North America Forum in Hollywood, California.
Comments On The News
“Model Metrics is honored to be named a Red Herring 100 finalist,” said Adam Caplan, CEO of Model Metrics. “The inclusion on the finalist list of most promising companies across North America further validates our proven business model in the enterprise cloud services industry."
"This year was very rewarding," said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. "The global economic situation has abated and there are many great companies producing really innovative and amazing products. We had a very difficult time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. Model Metrics shows great promise, therefore deserves to be among the Finalists. Now we’re faced with the difficult task of selecting the Top 100 winners of Red Herring North America. We know that the 2011 crop will grow into some amazing companies that are sure to make an impact."
About Red Herring Red Herring is a global media company which unites the world's best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine, an online daily technology news service, technology newsletters and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider's access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. RedHerring.com
About Model Metrics
Model Metrics, enabler of the Model Enterprise, delivers solutions and services at the cutting edge of the cloud computing industry. Since its founding in 2003, Model Metrics has become one of the most diversified and respected partners of salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services, Adobe, and Google. Headquartered in Chicago with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Minneapolis and Dallas, Model Metrics’ customer base spans all industries and includes enterprises such as Abbott, Allstate, Aon, Cars.com, CME Group, Honeywell, InfoUSA, MasterCard, Medtronic, and Orbitz.
With a focus on mobile and call center technology, business process and change management innovation, and custom development, Model Metrics has completed 1,500+ salesforce.com implementations for mid-sized and Fortune 1000 companies. Its world-class application development skills using Force.com, Adobe Flex and AIR, Amazon Web Services, Google and the Apple iPhone enable the creation of custom applications featuring multimedia-rich user experiences. To learn more, visit http://www.modelmetrics.com/ or follow us on Twitter at @modelmetricsinc.
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Contact:
Kelly Indrieri
Kulesa Faul for Model Metrics
(650) 340-1983 kelly@kulesafaul.com
Large hospice and palliative care provider uses Model Metrics’ cloud deployment and integration expertise to gain business visibility, cost savings and ultimately provide high quality care to its community
CHICAGO – May 2, 2011 – Model Metrics, a leader in cloud computing services for the enterprise, today announced the success of Tidewell Hospice in using cloud computing to provide high quality care to its patients and greater community. Florida’s premier hospice and palliative care provider, serving 1,300 patients a day, worked with Model Metrics to deploy Salesforce CRM and integrate it with its electronic medical records (EMR) system. Tidewell has greatly gained business visibility from the resulting system, improving the effectiveness of its business liaisons in building relationships with physicians, hospitals and the community, and giving the company a competitive advantage in the face of healthcare reform.
Bringing technological innovation to hospice and palliative care Tidewell’s innovative use of technology is paving the way for hospice and palliative care centers across the country. It wanted to extend the knowledge contained in its EMR system to track its referral relationships with physicians and hospitals, as well as fundraising, events and the grief and bereavement services it offers to families and its community. Tidewell saw the potential for CRM technology to support its business process, and leveraged donated and discounted licenses of Salesforce CRM from the Salesforce.com Foundation. It turned to Model Metrics for their expertise with Salesforce and the healthcare industry to customize the system to its unique needs.
Model Metrics’ cloud expertise and proven methodology led to a quick deployment. Translating Tidewell’s requirements into visual prototypes happened nearly instantaneously, with the system being configured and customized in just 60 days.
The dashboards Model Metrics created give business liaisons and their directors new insight into their relationships with physicians and long term care facilities, including referral performance by physician and admission trending. Management is now able to leverage standardized and consolidated information to direct liaisons to work more efficiently on the best referral sources that create access to hospice benefit.
Model Metrics integrated the cloud-based CRM system to Tidewell’s EMR system using the Informatica Cloud. Patient information from the EMR system such as census data and their transitions is automatically updated in the Salesforce system on a real time basis.
As a result, Tidewell has been able to save costs. The new system did not require a significant increase in headcount or operation. In addition, the business visibility and control afforded by the new system gives Tidewell a competitive advantage by being able to quickly adapt and expand into new markets as a result of the changes taking place in healthcare reform and Medicare reimbursement.
Comments on the News
“Model Metrics represents a new breed of services provider in the age of cloud computing. Their ability to provide nearly instantaneous proof of concepts of our vision, along with their healthcare and Salesforce domain expertise, was crucial in guiding us towards a solution that brings new innovation to how we run our business,” said Dave Lafferty, EVP and CIO, Tidewell Hospice. “Cloud computing not only affords us the opportunity to manage our organization without having to maintain a large IT department or infrastructure, but also gives us nimbleness to secure our future in the face of a changing healthcare system.”
“Tidewell Hospice is exemplary for its use of cloud computing in a unique healthcare environment,” said Adam Caplan, CEO of Model Metrics. “Through its foresight into how a cloud-based CRM system could apply to how it manages relationships with its community, Tidewell is able to focus its resources on its core mission to provide the best possible care to its patients and their families.”
About Tidewell Hospice Serving more than 1,200 patients daily in Sarasota, Manatee, Charlotte and DeSoto counties, Tidewell is one of the largest not-for-profit hospices in the U.S. Home-based palliative care is the basic premise of the program, involving the support of physicians, registered nurses, social service counselors, certified nursing assistants and volunteers, all following a prescribed plan of care. Tidewell's services are available to everyone, regardless of ability to pay. For more information, please visit: http://tidewell.org/
About Model Metrics Model Metrics, enabler of the Model Enterprise, delivers solutions and services at the cutting edge of the cloud computing industry. Since its founding in 2003, Model Metrics has become one of the most diversified and respected partners of salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services, Adobe, and Google. Headquartered in Chicago with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Minneapolis and Dallas, Model Metrics’customer base spans all industries and includes enterprises such as Abbott, Allstate, Aon, Cars.com, CME Group, Honeywell, InfoUSA, MasterCard, Medtronic, and Orbitz.
With a focus on mobile and call center technology, business process and change management innovation, and custom development, Model Metrics has completed 1,500+ salesforce.com implementations for mid-sized and Fortune 1000 companies. Its world-class application development skills using Force.com, Adobe Flex and AIR, Amazon Web Services, Google and the Apple iPhone enable the creation of custom applications featuring multimedia-rich user experiences. To learn more, visit http://www.modelmetrics.com/ or follow us on Twitter at @modelmetricsinc.
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Contact:
Kelly Indrieri
Kulesa Faul for Model Metrics
(650) 340-1983 kelly@kulesafaul.com
Apple's iPad is the hottest device in the workplace today. According to Computerworld, Medtronic recently purchased 4,500 iPads for employees, and they aren't the only ones. Microstrategy is behaving similarly. Many companies are making the jump early to adopt these devices and putting themselves at an advantage.
Given the iPad's vast consumer and business market acceptance (15 million units sold in 2010 alone), what exactly are companies doing with these devices? Are they more than just a pretty toy?
Join us for a free webinar where our CTO, John Barnes will walk through answers to those questions and more, including how to take salesforce.com Content with you even without an internet connection. If you don't currently have a tablet device strategy in place you don't want to miss this interactive event.
Data Management and Data Quality is an issue in every CRM deployment. The reason for this is that CRM data is not transactional and doesn’t get balanced at month end like accounting data. CRM systems are full of soft data points that can be aggregated to provide information and knowledge, but only if the foundation is accurate and trusted.
A data management strategy has many dimensions including proactive cleansing of data to prevent issues, reactive management of data to fix issues that already exist, manual processes of data stewards, and automated processes that ease the manual burden. The approach to choose will depend on the specific needs of the organization, but will probably include all of these components.
The most difficult part of implementing a strategy is having some metrics on which to base your response. With all of the potential data issues that exist, it makes sense to focus on the highest value, lowest effort fixes as a means of maximizing your CRM investment. Each problem has its own cost-of-bad-data associated with it, whether it be time spent pursuing out-dated information, hard dollars spent on marketing to the wrong contacts, or wasted time managing information that is obsolete to the business. It is imperative to understand these costs and how they impact the business, but that requires some basis for action.
Recently, Model Metrics has come up with a tool for taking the guesswork out of data quality in a salesforce.com implementation. Data Profiler interrogates an org’s data and metadata to provide concrete, actionable data quality indicators down to the field level! This tool is proven to provide our customers a baseline health check of their data quality, and on-going metrics on how it is improving or degrading over time.
The value of the Data Profiler comes in two main categories. First, the tool provides all of the raw data at a summary and detailed level to make an actionable data management plan. Second, the service Model Metrics provides to interpret the Data Profiler output and help to devise a plan that is unique to your business.
Data Profiler provides summary information related to data “Completeness” and “Conformity.” Completeness is the relative completeness of the records that are being entered in the system. If Contact records, for example, are just being entered with Names and Email Addresses, but no Phone Numbers, Addresses, or other information, the level of Completeness is going to be low. Conformity, on the other hand, is a measure of how the metadata of picklist values matches up with the actual values in a field. If there is low conformity, it likely means that there is a process by which records are being loaded into the system (without using the standard UI) and compromising data integrity.
Completeness and Conformity are only two of the metrics that are visible at a more detailed object and field level views. Object by object, there are metrics related to the record count, fields, ownership percentages, record aging, and much more.
The above is just a glimpse into the comprehensive data health report that the Data Profiler provides. If run on a monthly, quarterly, or even annual basis, it can prove as a compass on your data management roadmap. It can also help to measure progress against the initial baseline of data health and allow for easy identifications of new issues that are sure to arise over time. No CRM implementation should be without a solid data management plan and Data Profiler is a great way to start.
Now that I have a few days of distance from Dreamforce, and more importantly some sleep, I wanted to re-cap my thoughts on the conference I just attended along with 30,000 of my closest friends. First off I’m amazed at how much larger Dreamforce gets every year. This was my 6th one and I’ve had the privilege of speaking at the last five so I’ve seen it grow from being a smaller show at Moscone West, to taking over Moscone North and South, and now this year taking up all three venues. I think the big announcement back in ’05 was something around “Multi-force” and having multiple applications by switching the drop-down on the top right of the screen (which just essentially changed what tabs were available). This year we got to see VMForce go into private beta and become a reality, hear about the launch of database.com and the intent to acquire Heroku.
To me these announcements show that Salesforce.com is serious about the platform and making force.com a true competitor to other cloud platforms that are available today. The ability to support multiple languages (Apex, Visualforce, Ruby, Java, or anything and use database.com) shows a real commitment to the custom development community. Past Dreamforce’s have felt more CRM focused with some excitement around Force.com, but this one seemed more like the ship is truly changing directions and that the company is changing it’s focus and truly trying to broaden it’s reach. The training wheels have been removed from Force.com and now it can be used by developers of almost any background.
As with any marketing driven company we will have to wait a bit to see how this all comes together, what limits or governors exits, and the timing of these new options. I think one of the bigger announcements was a quiet one, that they will be reducing some governor limits by 70%. As with any PaaS platform you have to take the good with the bad. You have this huge platform to use and it takes away all of the low-level details and tweaks from you (which can be good), but since it is a shared environment you also have to be a good citizen and abide by the rules of sharing and governors (which can be challenging). The fact that these limits are raising will make developing on the platform even easier and will allow for richer applications.
More options, more languages, lower governors, I like where this is going.
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