CRM FYI

Anyone who knows me reasonably well knows I’m a Disney fanatic.  Whether it’s my coffee cup, my Goofy winter hat, reading blogs about it or going to the theme parks each year, I enjoy Disney all the time.  Their theme for 2009 has been “What will you celebrate?”  The goal is to get people in the park to celebrate anything; a birthday, wedding, anniversary, first tooth, or whatever.  This past summer, my wife and I went to Disneyland for our first trip without kids.  That was celebration enough, but since it was over my birthday, I got in the park free that day.  ($72 is worth celebrating if you ask me)

I felt inspired to take Disney’s question and adapt it to Dreamforce 09 in San Francisco this year.  I want to ask you, “What will you take home this year?”  While the trinkets and booth giveaways are great fun, that’s not what I’m talking about.  (Though I would like to thank Manticore for giving me a pen last year that has become my favorite)  What I want to know is what inspiration are you going to take home?  What seed of change is going to be planted in you that you’ll bring home and begin transforming your organization?

The inspiration for this question came from a video created by Jenna Baze (@Rather_Geeky) for the Dreamforce video contest this year.  Her premise; “Send me to Dreamforce so I can get my nickname back.”  She explained how she gained nicknames like AJ (Awesome Jenna) and Ozzie (Wizard of Oz) over the past year and half for the wizardry she did with Salesforce.  Business has changed though and maybe the systems haven’t changed to keep up with demand.  Jenna wants to go to Dreamforce to be inspired, learn a ton, and return to claim her nicknames back.

Jenna’s story is exactly why so many people need to attend Dreamforce.  I know in tough economic times, it’s hard to justify travel, time off work, and the cost of entrance to the conference.  Ironically, it’s in the toughest of economic times that people should be investing in sending people like Jenna to Dreamforce.  The insight gained, the connections made, the skills attained all add up to what I believe is one of the greatest returns on your Salesforce investment the whole year.

So while it’s great to hope for the nifty laser pen or the flying monkey to take home, there’s much more to be gained at Dreamforce than just that “stuff.”  Think about what you could bring home from Dreamforce that won’t run out of ink or batteries.  Think about what you can do to become a hero at your organization.  The ideas are there for the taking.  You in?

Suppose 63,000 companies that use the same software decide to take part in the world’s largest mass software upgrade event.  They all wanted to take advantage of some the great new features made available in “Snowman 10″, the code-name given to this new release.  They divide themselves into two groups and agree that group A will upgrade on one Friday night and group B will upgrade the following Friday night.

All the companies realize that in order to make this upgrade happen, they’re going to have to plan ahead.  They’re going to need test servers, database space, project managers, network engineers, application administrators, data backups, and most of all, they’re all going to need time.  Time to setup, time to install, time to configure, time to test, time to backup, time to deploy, time to test, and time to celebrate the completion of a successful software upgrade.

For the sake of easy math, let’s only look at the cost of the upgrade weekend.  Let’s assume that each company will need 1.5 people for 12 hours on the weekend of the upgrade, pretty much equal to 18 man-hours.  Assuming an average wage of $100 per hour, each company will pay approximately $1,800 in labor that weekend.  That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

$1,800 x 63,000 companies = $113.4 million

Assuming a happy outcome and all the companies get upgraded with no glitches, everyone’s happy.  But what happens to that $1,800 price tag when something goes wrong?  It goes up like crazy and for most companies, they’ve got to scramble to get that software running again by Monday morning or somebody’s going to be updating their resume.