How Force.com enables an analyst-driven approach to development projects

Michael W. Topalovich, CTO
Delivered Innovation

For years, the rallying cry for the CIO has been to align IT with “The Business.”  This presupposes that there is a wall between IT and other functions and processes within an organization, which of course we know to be the case. While nearly every business function that lives in its own silo has challenges integrating with other functions within the organization, IT has been particularly challenged because of the technology-centric reality of its world; while other functions may not necessarily have a direct impact on the value chain, IT is often viewed as being completely disconnected from it in many organizations.

Technology vendors have long targeted the CIO with messaging that implies an understanding of ITs alignment pain, and they have offered myriad remedies for closing the gap between IT and the underlying business processes that create value in an organization. Everything from enterprise applications to network management tools have promised to lead beleagured CIOs to the Shangri-La of “IT-Business-Alignment.”  Ironically, the technology with the most promise for bridging the IT-business divide has been right here under our noses, but only a relative handful of visionary organizations have embraced it to drive business value.

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Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak to OpSource CEO Treb Ryan about OpSource Cloud, the company’s headlong thrust into the enterprise cloud computing space long-dominated by…well, no one to this point.  Until now, OpSource has focused primarily on being a leading delivery platform for SaaS businesses, providing infrastructure, operations, and billing services to companies that, for all intents and purposes, already live in “the cloud.”  OpSource Cloud sets cross hairs on the enterprise (read: corporate) market, which for legitimate reasons has been largely apprehensive about shifting IT assets to the public cloud.

When I first read the OpSource Cloud announcement, I can’t say that the concept moved me to want to shout it from the rooftops; part of the reason is that I spent the first 10 years of my career managing IT infrastructure and I lost my passion for it long ago.  Another reason is that my company, Delivered Innovation, lives in a different part of the cloud “stack” and we leave the management of platforms and databases to our partners such as salesforce.com.  But I’ve followed Treb for the past few years, and I knew that someone with his vision had a grander plan than just building a better Amazon EC2.

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* Updated 8.14.09 with a link to a similar post by Jeff Douglas and refactored code that is more applicable to a broader audience using Apex PageReference methods rather than the original string concatenation that was used for human (non-Salesforce developer) readability

You’ve probably come across this before…you need to create a custom VisualForce page for a specific Record Type, but overriding the ‘New’ or ‘Edit’ button seems to be an all-or-nothing proposition (i.e. you can do a single VisualForce page and embed the Page Layout using Apex:Detail, but you can’t mix custom pages with standard Page Layouts). We came across this recently at Delivered Innovation, and we want to share our solution with the community. This specific example involves the Salesforce Case object, but can be applied to any Standard or Custom Object.

Use Case: Client has multiple call centers supporting various product lines; support team ‘A’ requires a custom Wizard to rapidly search for and collect details for the Case record that the standard Salesforce search interface cannot provide.

Solution: While you can assign a specific Page Layout to a specific Record Type and embed VisualForce pages in the object Detail view, currently salesforce.com does not support embedded VisualForce Pages in the Edit view of a Page Layout; likewise, salesforce.com does not support custom VisualForce pages for specific Record Types.  The solution is to “intercept” the command to create a new record in an Object before Salesforce processes it, and this is accomplished with a 1-line VisualForce page and a StandardController extension that pulls and analyzes certain URL parameters to enhance the out-of-the-box process routing capabilities of Salesforce.

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Kathy Harris: Innovating the Business Case Process

Kathy addresses a tectonic shift in project planning and business case development that we are seeing with our own clients – designing systems for the long-term or even for the enterprise as a whole may be a losing proposition in an era of rapid change and innovation. Read between the lines and she is making a very strong case for Situational Applications.

Three key points:

With many emerging techniques and technologies, the pace and nature of innovation is accelerating; thus, the time horizon in which we can take advantage of the opportunity is decreasing.

In a time of rapid innovation, if we always invest for the long term, then we miss many short term improvements that can make a significant difference in productivity, cost and even the happiness of the people whose problems you solve.

Thinking back on this [enterprise-wide] approach, I believe we wound up with bigger projects, more risk, more complexity, more people, more requirements, and often, a far bigger solution than was really needed.

Phil Wainewright: Go cloud, young man

Although Phil may not be saying anything that hasn’t already been said in his previous posts, this piece was striking for the directness and clarity of its vision. This could very well be an addendum to Tom Friedman’s ‘The World is Flat‘, updated to reflect the changes that we are seeing in the workplace thanks to the proliferation of Cloud Computing. The interesting part of Phil’s post is that it addresses the shift of white collar work to “the cloud,” whereas much of the discussion around work automation to this point has focused primarily on traditionally blue collar and manual professions.

Three key points:

We’re just at the beginning of a white-collar shake-out that is going to transform professions and will ultimately reshape our cities as office-based work becomes more mobile and dispersed. It’s going to be a scary, disruptive transformation…but resistance is futile.

Some may find it scary, though, as the Web makes it possible to contract work by the hour or minute, eviscerating established notions of job security.

As this upheaval works its way through society over the coming years, few people are going to feel truly in control of their destiny. Those determined to succeed by embracing the cloud and the Web will have the best chances.

It’s evident by this point that cloud computing technologies such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) have changed the way applications are developed.  The interesting thing that we are finding with our customer engagements is that the rapid and iterative nature of designing and developing apps on Force.com has created an entirely new set of challenges with how the apps are tested prior to deployment to production environments.  The ability to demonstrate application features and functionality to project stakeholders in near-real time is more of a double-edged sword than most people realize; on the one hand, being able to show progress and continuously incorporate feedback has fundamentally changed the concept of application development and delivery.  On the other hand, if expectations are not managed properly, the ability to visually represent system designs and demonstrate prototypes in such a rapid timeframe could potentially trivialize the importance of testing, code refactoring and optimization, and change management.

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