ANALYSIS Driving Digital Transformation by Making Citizen Developers Heroes

Author: Jeffrey M. Kaplan / Source: E-Commerce Times

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Corporate executives know that if they don’t transform their companies into digital enterprises they are going to be at a significant competitive disadvantage going forward. Yet, many corporate leaders have been unable to make significant progress transforming their organizations. Many executives have found that changing their corporate cultures is a lot harder than adopting the new generation of cloud-based applications and services that make the digital enterprise possible.

No company has done more to advocate for this digital transformation process — so it can sell more of the cloud solutions to power new age businesses — than Salesforce. And no company is more at risk if a growing number of organizations fail to pursue their own digital transformation initiatives.

For the past decade, Salesforce has become a market leader not only by offering a more user-friendly CRM solution via a Software as a Service model, but also by painting a clear picture for CXOs about the tangible business benefits of a more connected, go-to-market strategy that capitalizes on e-commerce, mobile and social channels via the cloud.

Now Salesforce is shifting its attention dramatically — away from solely selling CXOs on the virtues of leading the digitization process, and toward showing how everyday employees can make the transformation process a reality.

My Oh My

This shift was clearly on display at this year’s Dreamforce conference, Salesforce’s annual lovefest in San Francisco. Salesforce has taken a two-pronged approach to accelerating the digital transformation process and bolstering its sales growth to continue to defy the “law of large numbers.”

First, Salesforce has made its applications and developer tools easier to use in the hope of attracting more companies and programmers to its products and services. Second, Salesforce has invested heavily in a vibrant new training program, called “Trailhead,” to increase exponentially the population of citizen programmers who can capitalize on its software capabilities.

Salesforce’s major product announcements at Dreamforce centered around the company’s new generation of more personalized, solution-building capabilities. Salesforce promised to make its current offerings more user-friendly, with simpler graphical interfaces and less software coding requirements.

The company unveiled new “my” branding across many of its key product areas to emphasize the increasing ease of use and customization capabilities of…

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