As the President and Founder of OpenGate Consulting, a Skuid and Salesforce partner that helps clients design, deploy, and support highly adopted business applications, Alec Elmore has a unique ability to simplify complex technology issues into practical action.
A few months ago, we sat down with Alec to interview him for a video featuring OpenGate Consulting and client JBMP Group. To celebrate Dreamforce 2018, we wanted to share some of his additional insights that Salesforce customers and other enterprise software users alike find relatable.
Understand the challenges of enterprise software today.
“If I look at the system like a mirror, does it reflect what I do everyday? Too many times it does not. It reflects some other image of what I should be doing, which makes my life just so much harder. So I either don't get what I need to get done, or it takes me twice as long, or I miss things… There's a cost of maintenance, and for whatever reason IT folks and CIOs are willing to live with that cost until it's just unbearable. Organizations need to be nimble, and need to be able to react to the market quickly. And a code-based world is the antithesis of that.”
Recognize value of the user experience.
“When I think of user experience, I also think of business experience. It's a business person sitting down and doing a job. They need to be able to be efficient about it. They need to be able to know what their day and their life should be, very clearly. Skuid allows us to create that environment… If you're doing that without Skuid, you're doing a lot of code, so it may look pretty at the end, but it's not scalable, and the effort it took to build it is ten times the energy we used with Skuid.”
Make this the moment that changes everything.
“We were working with a client about four and a half years ago. They're a small company that had spent a million dollars on a custom system, and asked us what to do next. We said, ‘Well, you're not going to scale on this platform. It's just not going to grow with you.’“… When we found Skuid, I'll never forget it.
I was able to give it to a junior analyst and said, ‘Hey, I need you to go build this front-end prototype, and we've got two days.’ He built me something in two days in a prototype, and I said, ‘Wow, this is kind of interesting.’ It happened to be at the time of Dreamforce.
I tell Ken, Skuid’s CEO, this story all the time. I met with Ken behind the Skuid Dreamforce booth, and I said, ‘Ken, can you really do what this looks like you can do?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely.’
“We ended up building up that project for that client four years ago for half of what they spent before, and with way more functionality. They continue to license Skuid. They license it for communities now, and they continue to build on it, and it's been their platform for growth ever since.”
Build relationships between IT and business.
“I had one client where we had built the whole organization around Salesforce and Skuid. We handed off to a new CIO and his comment was, ‘I've never been in an organization where IT is so far ahead of the business and able to react to anything.’ That, I think, is a testament to the platform it's built on.” Ready to try out the platform Alec uses to solve challenges for his clients? Try Skuid for free today.
