State of Salesforce DevOps in the Insurance industry

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Description

Jeffrey Garwood, VP of Technical Architecture for Financial Services, Salesforce, and Rob Cowell, Gearset DevOps Advocate, delve into the use of Salesforce DevOps in the Insurance industry. This webinar uses the State of Salesforce DevOps Report, the largest ever Salesforce DevOps survey, to consider:

  • The specific challenges for Salesforce teams in the Insurance industry
  • How these teams are performing
  • What DevOps practices they’re using
  • What these teams are aiming to achieve with DevOps in 2023

Transcript

With that, I think we have, a few more folks on. And looking at the time, I think we should probably get started.

So welcome, everyone. This is today's session on the state of Salesforce DevOps for the insurance industry. We're zeroing in on looking at how some of the findings that we've had in this year's report, relate specifically to that sector.

And, hopefully, we'll, we'll we'll try and sort of target that a little around for you.

So we designed the state of Salesforce DevOps survey to gain as much knowledge as we can about how real teams out there with Salesforce are adopting and experiencing DevOps.

So this year, we had over twelve hundred Salesforce professionals take part and help us identify some of those key trends and and the pain points, that teams are facing.

So as I say, in this webinar, we're gonna kind of zoom into that a little bit and look at the insurance industry. And to help me do that, we have a a subject matter expert. So I'd like to introduce, my cohost today, Jeff Garwood. He's the VP of technical architecture for financial services at Salesforce, and he's gonna be discussing some of these findings with me. So, Jeff, do you wanna, add to that introduction, Emil?

Sure. Thanks, Rob. So, Jeff Garwood. So I lead the regulated industries across Salesforce, so including financial services. I've been here about eleven years now, so I've seen a lot of the evolution of our product and also the DevOps practices around that. And I'm really glad to be here today.

Thank you, Jeff. And for those that don't know me, I'm Rob Cowell, one of the DevOps advocates here at Gearset. Hopefully, here to bring you some guidance and insight and spread the joy of DevOps to you all.

So with that said, let's start with diving into some of the key findings of the report this year and see the key elements that relate to the insurance sector.

So when we think about the current state of play within the ecosystem, the continued growth of Salesforce's importance to the business stands front and center.

And as you can see there, seventy seven percent of insurance companies consider Salesforce to be key to achieving their business goals.

Additionally, ninety two percent have seen the demand on those Salesforce teams increase in the last year.

So with the majority of insurance companies considering Salesforce to be key to achieving those business goals, it's unsurprising that that demand has increased.

So, Jeff, is that largely matching what you're seeing across some of the clients that you work with?

Oh, yeah. Most definitely, Rob. So, you know, I think I'll go back a step even where we see this as true today. It actually accelerated during COVID. Right? So, what we saw was during COVID, there was a basically, a sharper realization of the ability to innovate quickly and move quickly.

And when you think about what, DevOps brings to that is the readiness to adapt and be able to adapt, you know, quickly, and that became almost critical success factors and even survival factors along the way. Another thing too that I think accelerated during COVID and is as true now as it was then was the move toward more of a customer three sixty view. So, you know, the expectations that insurance insurance, customers and, even the brokers and things that are part of the ecosystem are expecting a much deeper relationship and the ability to have a more coherent view across all the channels that they, they interact with, and they expect that blended experience both in person and online.

So I think all that accelerated even more quickly. And, you know, with Salesforce's three sixty kind of vision on things, it's become a bit more of a central focus for a number of companies.

Absolutely.

So the the kind of counter challenge to that, I guess, is that, you know, from our survey, we we saw that thirty one percent of teams within this industry don't actually have DevOps training specifically.

And that's kind of worrying because teams that train regularly tend to outperform those that don't. And it seems like the insurance industry isn't prioritizing that training, as as highly as it could. If we look at other industries, for example, you know, the respondents were saying, you know, there's only sixteen percent of of teams that didn't have that DevOps training.

So, Jeff, you know, given that you kind of work so closely with folks in this industry, why do you think that figure of, you know, that percentage of folks that don't have the DevOps training is comparatively higher?

Yeah. That's a great question. I think in some ways, it's related to the prior slide as well too. I think what's happened is if you look at the increase of the mission criticality of the systems, particularly Salesforce in insurance organizations, it went from being a bit of a adjunct to becoming, you know, sometimes just on the sales side to being much more interwoven through their marketing and onboarding and adjudication and a whole bunch of other pieces as they're tying them all together.

That mission criticality is increasing, and that's been accelerating in the last few years. So I think what happens is there's sometimes a lag with the funding of the the, you know, as the criticality goes up, there's a lag in the funding and recognition of the the DevOps team with the equal investment in those teams. So it's almost like the business is getting ahead of the processes and the governance and the infrastructure to support those.

So I think it's almost like a start up. Right? You you get started. The business starts moving faster, and the things that worked for you in the past won't necessarily scale. So the need to take a step back and try to get ahead of what is becoming more of a a complexity of the environments themselves and the things that worked at prior stages.

I think there's a bigger thing as well, which is a bit of a historical perspective maybe, is there's a misperception in some organizations that cloud doesn't have to have the same degree of investment as your traditional systems. Right?

That cloud just kinda happens. Right? And we all recognize that as our systems are becoming more mission critical, they're getting deeply integrated in our car centered environments, the velocity is going up, and the reliance on the business of those systems has gone up.

The need to actually treat those with the same discipline and expand, you know, the the backing of the interest of the organization to grow that and see that as a critical enabler is key. And then I think, you know, the other part is too, maybe it's also that there wasn't a lot out there in the past. Right? But the the training on agile DevOps, particularly Salesforce DevOps, has really improved a lot over the last few years. So I think if you take a step back, there's new opportunities too for the teams to have training where perhaps, you know, it was a little more limited in in what was out there for them to even access.

So Yeah.

And, you know, I know that we're we're certainly here. We're we're trying to sort of level that playing field a little bit with some of our training content. But what I found interesting as well, if we if we look at some of the detail on that, that DevOps training, you know, across all the industries, The the training in things like CICD and automation was seen as the, you know, the most beneficial, potential value to unlock. You know? And seventy three percent of the insurance folks were saying that, you know, CR and CD and automation was kind of the most benefit for them.

And, you know, given the sort of increased, complexity that we talked about there, you know, particularly around CICD and automation, you know, it's not really, you know, a surprise that folks would see that as as their highest priority. You know, the more complex, the more training, that folks are gonna want around that.

But we, you know, we do try and encourage folks to take a walk before you run approach to DevOps.

You know, CICD is one of the more sort of advanced topics for for mature DevOps practitioners.

We certainly come back to sort of, you know, how to get started on that training journey and and how to kind of evolve the DevOps to that point, a little later as we as we go through today's session.

But the complexity is growing. You know, there's there's no doubt about it. You know, if we look at some of the, the metrics we have, from the report there, you know, we have more clouds in use. So whether that's sales cloud, service cloud, marketing cloud, you know, or even some very sort of specialist things like, Salesforce industries and CPQ.

You know, that complexity is growing. And with that, you know, there's there's more code, there's more integration, there's more things to manage, basically, which does mean that, you know, folks are are having to continually manage that. And if you couple that with that deficit in the training, it's definitely an area that we want to be addressing, really. You know, in the insurance industry and and others, you can streamline some of those workflows with with fostering a bit more collaboration and cross functional cooperation.

You can put in the tools that will increase that efficiency and reliability, automate every stage of that life cycle where you can. You know, there's a whole bunch of technical best practice. You know, I I could I could do a an entire shopping list of those. But I think also, you know, there's there's a little bit of, sort of cultural fit around that as well. You know, data security and compliance are absolutely, essential to regulated industries like this. So, you know, leverage your sandboxes to isolate your environment, use repositories for version control with suitable security around those.

But also, you know, governance is is a key aspect of this, you know, transparency, accountability, and most importantly, teamwork.

Teamwork is is truly that cornerstone of of getting a robust DevOps culture.

So, Jeff, with that kind of touch point on on teamwork, let's kind of dive into that a little more in a little more detail.

So as we kind of look at some of the figures back from the report, we can see that, you know, we we've talked about, you know, the collaboration within teams and how effectively teams, kind of use that collaboration and have a culture of collaboration. And some very encouraging statistics there. You know, we're we're seeing seventy eight percent, you know, rating that as as excellent, which is encouraging to see.

But it's also important to look at kind of the individual aspect as well. You know, if we, look at the emphasis on individual excellence with the team, it becomes greater than the sum of its parts, and and you you end up with a high performing team.

So, you know, we'd encourage teams to continuously develop that skill and ex so expertise, sorry, on a individual basis, and that compounds and and grows the team out. Keep up to date with best practice for Salesforce, pursue relevant certifications where time permits, because these these can all make a significant impact on the DevOps process. You know, you've got things like Trailhead modules. You have our own equivalent platform, DevOps Launchpad, but also, you know, peer to peer learning sessions. You know, share that individual knowledge to your peers, and and you grow the team there.

And this type of team coordination is vital in the insurance industry where some of those processes can be very complex, and and there's a you know, it's common to have multiple stakeholders.

So if you foster a collaborative environment and encourage open communication, idea sharing, seamless coordination, you absolutely stand to to benefit from that. And there's a lot of sort of practical formal steps that that can, support that process. So regular stand ups, retrospectives, and, you know, these things all kind of ensure alignment and get a bit of a sense of shared responsibility there. And if you all work towards those common goals, then the team's gonna be able to streamline the Salesforce DevOps a lot better.

But off the back of that, you know, one of the kind of, greatest ways to to grow and and foster that sense of alignment and everybody kind of steering in the same direction, of course, is executive sponsorship. It's an absolute vital part of that process. So, Jeff, do you wanna talk to that element a little for us?

Sure. Thanks, Rob. So, you know, I think you in a prior talk talked about, shared responsibility. So I kinda love that line.

Right? So if you look at the the the graph and how the, basically, the team's excellence improves while the overall culture improves, those two are not separate. Right? They go hand in hand.

So the the focus on building sponsorship in the business is absolutely critical. So we're gonna come we're gonna dig into that even further a little later. But just I'll just kinda make the point that, like, great work alone. You know, great work alone, even if you work ninety hours a week without connecting those dots to the business and the overall, executive sponsorship across the organization is really hard to maintain and sustain.

Right? So the idea is to basically go and if you build that sponsorship, give them regular updates on progress demonstrating the value and impact of the work. You'll create a culture that basically will kind of be like good leads to good, or success leads to success.

So building upon the work that you're doing, show them the business impact, have them reinvest in the the DevOps practice to, again, create a a virtuous cycle, to basically take that forward. So in a way, you know, I'll just kinda say again, you know, we see people work super hard, and they're they're working eighty hours a week, but they're doing it in a, you know, in a bit of an isolation. So getting that great work out and bit getting your executive sponsors to buy in is kinda one of the keys to to growing the overall success.

Absolutely. And for absolute clarity, we really don't encourage folks to be working eighty, ninety hours, on on these types of things. You know, let's let's try and sort of work to, to to to help folks balance that out a a lot better.

But on the kind of flip side of the, you know, the the team collaboration and the sponsorship, you know, and the the very sort of offline skills, of course, you know, we we obviously are gonna have the the tooling and the processes around, you know, putting some of these things in place. So, you know, in the insurance industry where some factors such as reliability and scalability are absolutely vital, it is important that you kinda get that balance between those individual heroics that you kind of alluded to with those, you know, those rock stars in the team, putting in those those extra hours. But also, you know, balancing that out with efficient tools and processes so that the, you know, the work that people do is supported by an efficient process. It's it's not lost effort because of technical challenges.

So it's one of these things where we we like to emphasize that the tools and and processes are enablers of success, but they're not the sole drivers of success. And it's it is a a almost a collaboration between the people element and the technology element, and getting that balance right is is kind of a key there. But if we promote kind of tools such as, you know, version control, automated testing, CICD, then I think some of that will will kind of naturally fall into place. But it allows you to implement those best practices. It minimizes a bit of the human error, and then you get that consistency, repeatability.

You don't have necessarily that dependence on specific individuals because you have a process that everybody can potentially follow.

And that kind of fosters that sort of stable efficient environment.

You know, you've you've kind of nailed that piece, and then team members can focus on much higher value activities.

Now when we look at those higher value activities, you know, those tend to be the, the areas which are much more focused around business needs, business goals, and the things that we have to do. And when I talk about the things that we have to do, of course, I'm talking about things like compliance and governance.

And I know, you know, in as someone that works across financial services, including insurance, governance is is definitely something that's a big part of of what you look at, Jeff. So you wanna talk to us a little around sort of the the way that governance plays into some of this efficiency?

Sure. Sure. So, you know, take a step back. So we got a great team cranking away. You got sponsorships that have some visibility and insight into what you're doing. You have some environment and processes backing up. And you might say process and governance are similar, but I'll kinda make a distinction.

One is kinda the method you're moving things through. Governance is about some rules of the road. Right?

So how do you start to put some formal, processes and documentation around between the development teams, the testers, the business sponsors, and all the other stakeholders out there? And sometimes it's just putting simple ground rules and expectations in place so that there's a rhythm to the DevOps. Right? So what are the rules of the road on when things can come in?

What can be the release? When do you merge? How do you merge? What what counts as deploy, what counts as a as a defect, and then people to help structure and provide prioritization around that.

And especially in a large insurance organization or any other, you have multiple lines of business, multiple policy systems, multiple integrations.

You have multiple dev streams, sometimes multiple Salesforce orgs, but then you also have some degree of common packaging maybe that are core security packages or other, packages that you are basically saying are standard across the organization no matter and how to create a centralization on those, but still allow a lot of individual freedom and independence. And the only way to do that is to really have some structure and guidance to basically establish what, again, those rules of the road are. Right? What do we all agree can happen in a release?

What is reasonable and expectation? What happens if we have to push something? How much work can we put in any one, sprint? Right?

What what are some of those guidelines and something, you know, allowing things to give to maintain that quality? Right? So the idea is, you know, it's basically ensuring that you're creating boundaries to ensure that what actually at the end of the day adds value and has quality, right, and still can move fast. But, how do you do that and balance the criticality of what the business says it needs?

Right? So how do you create the governance to basically prioritize and weigh those?

So yeah. It it it needs to be steered as well as efficient.

That's that I think is a is a key message there.

So moving on, as we kind of increase the, the footprint of our Salesforce orgs and the number of folks that are using that and the ways that we're using it, of course, you know, we're gonna increase the number of potential challenges there. And the increased demand has increased the challenges that we're seeing, and we can see that, you know, there's a range of issues here, but far and away is is that lack of experience, which kinda comes back to what we were saying about training. You know, we have fifty nine percent saying that, you know, they lack experience with, the DevOps, and forty five percent saying they're not necessarily getting that buy in from the team. Now that is a little higher than other industries, but I think, you know, some of the areas that we've touched on, around sort of working with sponsors and, you know, we're getting the right governance in place, I think we'll certainly solve some of that.

So, you know, when we talk about buying, you know, that's kind of steering the ship in the same direction and and kind of getting everybody to to see the value of, implementing DevOps and and improving those processes.

So in a nutshell, you know, how can we kind of foster a culture that improves that buy in figure? How can we get everybody pulling in the same direction?

Sure.

I could take that.

So I think there's kinda two sides of it. Right? There's the organizational support, and then there's institutionalizing the culture. And I'll talk about what I mean by buzz it is.

So we talked a little bit about buy in. Right? So how do we how do we make sure that the management has insight into what we do? Right?

And that takes a deliberate effort on both sides. And I've I'll use the word shared shared accountability again. Right? Both sides have to invest in it.

But often what I see is sometime or sometimes I see, is that DevOps teams are so busy, and they're so just in the work of getting the just getting what they have to even get done done that they sometimes don't carve out time for that job of informing management, measuring and demonstrating success. Right? It's basically if I just keep up and I just release more and I can manage to get this stuff out, we'll be okay. Right?

And you can get by with that, but there is a point at which you have to start thinking, at least what I've seen is where organizations start to carve out a bit of their time, because if you think about it, all the great work and awareness of what you do shouldn't just come in times of crisis. Right? That you pulled off something magic. Right?

It should be that there should be a deliberate process where you're trying to get an awareness of the work and the gaps you have that if could fix could actually drive even bigger business gains. Right? So, again, the importance of, conveying the importance of dev of DevOps to freeing up that business value. I'm gonna make a just hang on.

I'm gonna make a quick pitch for a book I usually tell all my mentees about. It's called Brag How to toot your own horn without blowing it. It's out on Amazon. And the premise is that sharing success and knowledge is not bragging if you do it correctly.

Right? And if you're not sharing, you're actually keeping others from learning and being even more successful from it. So kind of the idea that, you know, both as an individual and as a team, we're sharing our success and knowledge can help the organization itself be more successful and have knowledge.

So that's the one side. The other side is institutionalizing the change.

Right? So, again, taking the time to just slow it down a tiny bit and in a kaizen way, continue and improve things and document and incorporate the processes into the tooling. Right? So basically institutionalizing all the best practices and what you know.

So building it into the release processes, into the tooling, into the governance structures. And even if it's just three new things. Right? Because people can only absorb so much.

Right? So this is what I call kaizen of life kinda. You just do a little bit better all the time and take three new things. And what happens is you do those, and it becomes second nature.

People must forget what they're doing. I'm sorry. The battery is running low here. I just realized it didn't plug in.

That it becomes second nature. Then only they're gonna realize that that's what they're doing. It's just what we do. Right?

So take three new things, institutionalize them, and then take three new things. And over time, you'll see majority of the, team can grow very quickly. If you look back two years even or a year, how far you can come by just taking a three and three approach and just building an intel. The organizational culture just grows underneath of it, and then essentially create something that's a little more lasting and ongoing as well.

Fantastic. Those are some solid, solid tips there and ones that I, you know, I can use myself as well. We are running a little behind on our on our topic today. I could, I could chat for ages on on these topics with you, but, we will keep things moving along.

So moving on to financial matters, we'll have a look at some of the figures there.

Teams generally are seeing a return on investment from their Salesforce DevOps with forty one percent of folks, across the board, looking that, an ROI of over ten thousand.

But we've got fifty two percent that don't actually know what that dollar amount is that they're saving. Now that might be that they're a little removed from the the budgets of of their organization, but it's important to realize that even the ones that aren't sure what that dollar return actually is, agree that there is an improved ROI from their processes even if they can't pin a a number on that. So, hopefully, that will that will go some way to convince, you know, your decision makers in your organization that DevOps definitely delivers value.

Now in the insurance industry, IT departments and, you know, other sort of service groups within an organization have been traditionally viewed as as cost centers.

But with DevOps, you have that opportunity to shift the perception a little, and position it as a strategic driver of value.

We can see that, you know, there's a lot of points on the slide there around ways in which we can potentially deliver that value through DevOps. And, you know, it it does form part of a an overall strategy of continuous improvement in in an organization.

So, Jeff, I know you you have a, you know, a passion for delivering that ROI and and value proposition within organizations. So somewhat than than we'd originally intended. Can you perhaps talk to, some of those strategies?

So, you know, at the end of the day, all the great work is done to add to the business value it's hard to it's hard to push ahead, right, and hard to get that executive buy in. So kinda what we alluded to earlier, I'll talk about, one company that we work with that you know, I'll shorten it down and say, what company we work with that really focused down on what are fully deployed user stories? So what is a full unit of business work that actually landed in the field? Whether it was fraud detection increase, claims auto adjudication, onboarding, something that creates a linkage between the what got deployed and some business value.

And they they literally spent time, not only with just kind of the Dura metrics, but also around things that actually were the business measures. So they would instrument into the app and spend a little bit extra time to figure out, could they actually capture in the app they just deployed, what were some of the increased measures of revenue, time, quality, satisfaction, whatever it was, throughput, you know, straight through through processing time, anything that could tie back to the business, and then they regularly documented those up to the business sponsor. So, again, the end the goal is to basically show the good work, show the impact of the business, show how a bit of an investment in putting in even better, DevOps practices can actually amount to an increase of faster velocity and quality of the deployed business, capabilities.

Fantastic.

So I think kind of in summary, I think, you know, some of the topics that we've discussed, you know, throughout our session today, are very much around that continuous improvement that we mentioned, around understanding that culture drives much of of what we're doing.

And the, you know, the the initial just kicking off that process and getting started is potentially the the hardest part of that. And I know, Jeff, you have a a a killer quote for how to get started there that we could probably Yeah. Use for us to ponder.

Sure. Sure. So I have a line of use with my kids. Pick it up on my wall here too. It's basically it's take from the journey of a thousand miles, you know, as one step. Is, basically, I have this line that I use it with all the time, which is getting started is the hardest part of getting started. Right?

So sometimes just taking the time to be deliberate, capturing and sharing that impact, and consciously laying out what are the three next steps we, as a group and organization, wanna invest in and improve will go a long way. So, you know, basically, taking that journey a step at a time. And if you get you know? And and we do see this where teams are struggling to survive, and they're overwhelmed. And, you know, the the business is just throwing more developers at it.

Slowing down to speed up, I know it's a catchy it's something overused, but slowing down a tiny bit to speed up and being deliberate about that can actually help set you on the right path and get the executive sponsorship that you perhaps might wanna improve or might need, to help improve the the process and make it more sustainable. And, again, institutionalized so it, you know, is bigger than any one person and becomes something that's a value add, And people can just join in, and they could onboard and know how to leverage those processes and become more of a self sustaining, positive influence to the to the business. So Fantastic.

So those are some fantastic insights and advice, Joe. And I, you know, I know that real practical advice like that is gonna resonate with a lot of folks here on the call. In terms of the facts and figures from the report, we do have a lot more of those that you can get from downloading the report. We have a a QR code there, that folks can scan to get the full report. If you're not near your phone or a QR scanner of any kind right now, don't worry.

We are gonna send a a catch up recording, in a follow-up email, and, of course, the links to the report there.

So it's been a whistle stop tour. We, we we are slightly over time, so thank you for everyone's patience, as we as we went through that. All that remains for me to do is to thank our special guest today, Jeff Garwood, for joining us, and we wish you all well with the next steps of your Salesforce DevOps journey. Thank you very much, everyone, and we'll see you soon.