The Dreamforce 2021 Architect Rally
Salesforce co-founder and CTO Parker Harris introduces Salesforce Well-Architected
Good Architects Needed
Salesforce co-founder and CTO Parker Harris hosted Build Your Digital HQ with Salesforce Architects at Dreamforce 2021, the first-ever Salesforce architect keynote. He said Salesforce customers “need far, far more architects,” with about ten positions open for every available architect. Aspiring for quality as well as quantity, Parker wants architects to design digital transformation “the right way” on the Salesforce platform.
Essential Architectural Characteristics
Parker announced a new initiative, Salesforce Well-Architected, with the following features:
Trust
Speed to Value
Adaptability
Performance
Scalability
By providing a continuously available and secure platform, Salesforce delivers its highest value to its customers - trust. In addition, its platform and solutions have scaled up, sustaining high performance as usage and system loads have boomed. Parker wants architects to extend these well-architected characteristics into their solutions.
Why do Organizations Need Architects?
An organization wants its solutions designed and built the right way the first time. Architects can manage that by:
Understanding well-defined, complete functional requirements
Ensuring users have all the data they need, no matter where it resides
Keeping solution access and data secure with minimal friction
Designing adaptable solutions, balancing speed to value, and simplicity
Building on a robust platform like Salesforce
The architect keynote continued with three Salesforce architect evangelists telling stories about achieving the goals listed above.
Drive Alignment by Zayne Turner, Senior Director, Architect Relations at Salesforce
Transform Integration by Susannah St-Germain, Lead Evangelist, Architect Relations
Unlock Engagement Marc Braga, Principal, Architect Relations
Zayne Turner showed how to drive stakeholder alignment by virtually putting them on the same page. She demonstrated this by updating one of the new data model diagrams from architect.salesforce.com while sharing it on Slack. Real-time collaboration like this saves a lot of time in the design process.
All three stories referred to this business capability map, reflecting the purpose of a fictional sporting goods retailer’s digital transformation:
In Transform Integration, Susannah St-Germain used a system landscape diagram to show a solution integrating Salesforce Customer 360 with Slack for collaboration and Tableau for Analytics. Mulesoft connects the Salesforce solutions to five external systems, extendable to more systems:
Twenty-first century solutions need to adapt to fast-changing requirements without becoming too complex. For example, Salesforce’s App Builder and Flow Builder enable administrators to build Lightning pages for user experience and flows to automate processes without writing code. These tools enable admins to deliver value quickly. If they encounter constraints with App or Flow Builder, they can further extend pages with Lightning web components and extend flows with Apex actions. If a page or flow needs even more customization, a developer can make advanced extensions to meet the organization’s needs.
Marc Braga demonstrated how Interaction Studio quickly discovered a customer’s product affinities and customized her experience around them. Next, he showed how Einstein Personalization Recipes could fine-tune personalization and product recommendations to unlock customer engagement.
Today’s consumers expect online businesses to remember what they like and make meaningful recommendations accordingly. Think of media recommendations from Amazon and major streaming services like Netflix and Spotify. Multiplying that by millions of consumers gives one an idea of mass personalization’s complexity and computational demands.
What do Architects Need from Salesforce?
Architects need a platform that sustains high availability and performance with growing user demand and load. Dreamforce 2021 included a session, “Architecting at Scale,” showing a new Performance Assistant to support measuring and optimizing solution performance. Salesforce also has a Scale Center in the works to measure org-wide concurrency errors and response-time spikes.
Architects need a way to build trust as well as solutions. Once they have designed a way to bring data and services together for a solution, they need to keep access secure. Parker Harris emphasized security in the architect keynote, saying, “one vulnerability is one too many.” Fortunately, Salesforce offers an extensive data-sharing model and security infrastructure.
Architects also need design patterns and guides to build adaptable systems, enabling administrators and managers to deliver value quickly while minimizing the need for custom code.
Salesforce Architects’ Outlook
Before designing a solution the right way, architects must ensure they’ll design the right solution, starting with accurate and thorough requirements from business analysis. Then, they design the right solution by fulfilling those requirements.
Businesses and consumers will continue to demand more and better information from their suppliers and retailers. Business analysts and architects can prepare for this onslaught by clarifying needs and driving alignment among stakeholders. Given established clear and complete requirements, Salesforce architects can collaborate with stakeholders to design solutions that meet the organization’s needs. These solutions can gather data from multiple sources, keep it safe, and employ advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to well-inform business decisions and increase customer engagement.
Salesforce rallied architects at Dreamforce 2021, evangelizing new techniques and tools to design solutions that will meet escalating demands for more sophisticated information.