Set yourself up for Education Cloud’s Digital Transformation – Part 2 of 2

In the first of this two-part series, we explored a couple of key objectives the team at your university should accomplish in order to make the most of Salesforce’s Education Cloud.

Catch up on Part 1 to learn how to incorporate your organization’s vision, value proposition and team capabilities into your Education Cloud implementation approach.

Let’s finish the task by looking at the final two objectives that will be integral to your Education Cloud success.

Objective 3: Identify Your Integration Strategy

To get the full 360-degree view of your students you need to be prepared for integration between Salesforce and your existing campus solutions. As we’ve seen before, this typically results in too many pots of coffee late at night the week before go-live and success can often be dependent on one hero pulling off all of the integration work at the last minute.

There’s a better way.

Integration must be a prominent component of your Education Cloud strategy. There are many means to integrate Salesforce with your existing systems. To determine which approach makes sense, you need to do your homework. Identify what data points need to be integrated between Salesforce and other campus systems.

Start by answering these questions:

1. What is the Source of Truth for each data point?
2. What data do you need from external sources in Salesforce and what data do your external systems need from Salesforce?
3. Do you need to see that data or see and edit it?
4. When do you need data to be available in Salesforce/external systems? Do you need it in Salesforce in real time or can an overnight batch meet your needs?
5. Do you need end users to review errors or manually match records on rare occasions?
6. Do you need to transform the data between the systems (i.e., do you record states in 2-letter abbreviations in your ERP and write the full name in Salesforce? MN > Minnesota)
7. Do you need to kick off workflows between updates in systems?
8. What are your IT team and end users prepared to support?

Once you have your answers you can begin to evaluate which integration approach makes sense for each system connecting to Salesforce, whether it be a middleware tool like Jitterbit, a custom API integration, manual ETL, or utilizing Salesforce Connect.

Determining and implementing the proper process for each of these connecting systems can seem like a daunting task and we can help. If you have questions about implementing a given system or what you need to consider regarding your overall strategy, let us know and we’ll walk through it together.

Objective 4: Create Your Roadmap

Now it’s time for the last objective in our two-part series. After working through the first three objectives you should have an understanding of who will be impacted by Education Cloud and how. You should also have an idea of what you aim to get out of the solution, who will be impacted internally, the skill sets of your team, and what data is critical for your implementation’s success. The next step is to begin designing your roadmap. How will you get from where you are today to the vision you established in objective 1?

Start by going back to your value proposition maps. For each product or service you identified, evaluate the risks and the rewards of implementation. Place each item on the graph. This should help you determine the order of your rollout. Start with low-risk/high-reward examples to build momentum and increase campus support for the project. From there, move on to more difficult goals, utilizing the full power of your invested and increasingly knowledgeable team to see the project through.

Ultimately there are other criteria to evaluate the order of implementation like external factors that may make some teams less available at certain times of the year, or data architecture implications that may require some groundwork to be built before the lowest risk project begins.

Have questions about how to get started with Education Cloud? Redpath can help you along the way to understand the risk/reward ratio of each aspect of your project and determine the outlook of your full roadmap, as well as all applicable tech considerations. Contact our higher education team for more info.