Blogs

Roadblocks May Actually be Detours

By Brian Bolt posted 08-04-2021 05:23 PM

  

Boise State's Salesforce Marketing Cloud project began this past April.  Since that time, the project team has met regularly with Boise State's Office of Communications and Marketing (OCM) and University Foundations.  While we initially cast a wide net for our first phase of implementation, we quickly realized that we would need to first focus on business use cases for these two areas.

While reviewing the inventory of use cases provided by OCM and University Foundations, we noticed that the use cases for each department had strengths, opportunities, and complexities. Although the University Foundations email distribution target population and cadence of use cases are well documented and clear, their constituent data is sourced from a system of record that is difficult to extract from. The trade-off is exactly opposite for the OCM use cases: a variety of cadence and population types sourced from our readily integrated ERP systems.

The University Foundations use cases were also complicated by a small, but significant legal matter.  University Foundations is a separate entity from the University proper, and data use agreements need to be accepted when data is processed or handled by a Boise State employee.  An interesting situation arose when the technical team declined (politely and diplomatically) to sign the agreement due to the perception that they accept personal liability for any breach.  Amicable conversations involving upper management and counsel from both sides will hopefully lead to an agreement that will allow us to proceed with an elegant technical design rather than a less optimal approach of manually pruning the data before ingesting into our integration platform, or purchasing a separate tool for University Foundations staff to transform the data before loading into our integration platform.

Although forward motion has been reduced, we have taken the opportunity to more thoughtfully consider our overall CRM design and better account for data flowing through the integration, CRM, and Marketing Cloud systems.  For the presentation layer in Salesforce Service Cloud, the project team used native functionality to create a record type that forces a read-only page view of information from data sourced from University Foundations' system of record.  The externally sourced record type will be accessible to CRM users who are assigned a specific permission set.  Using the Marketing Cloud to Salesforce Connector, data will flow to different Marketing Cloud business units.  The "business unit" is a Marketing Cloud term for describing distinct and separate slices of Marketing Cloud for business purposes that are divisible by a boundary - in our case, organizational structure.  University Foundations will have their own business unit that will contain the contact information for the population of users relevant to their line of business.  OCM will have a separate business unit.  Access controls and configuration policies enforce and maintain the proper level of access to the assigned users.

While setbacks are a natural part of every project, I was reminded that roadblocks can serve as detours that create time to consider how to achieve an even greater outcome.  I often view the act of writing as a roadblock that prevents me from doing something I perceive to be more productive. Yet, as I come to the close of this blog post I'm prompted to recall that the practice of writing, whether scribing a letter, blog, or proposal, never fails to force me to consider events logically and comprehensively rather than abstractly and individually; and I'm again resigned to the fact that the detour has helped help me identify the positive outcomes of a scenario which I had previously viewed as unproductive.


#crm
#cx
0 comments
20 views

Permalink