It’s not for lack of desire that makes innovation a slow process at many enterprises. A new survey finds that while innovation is frequently a top five priority for CIOs, less than half have a well-defined process in place to do so. Of that group, 37% say although they are asked to be innovative, they aren’t sure where to start. 

Rob Harbin is the CIO and VP of Information Technology for United Federal Credit Union (UFCU). Founded in 1949, the growing company has 23 branches in six states. Several years ago, Harbin and other UFCU executives were visiting another bank, where they were blown away by the platform that financial institution was using.

Among the impressive features were dashboards and metrics, the ability to instantly recall data, and the ease at which they could manage compliance. Further examination revealed the bank had moved its operations to what is now the Salesforce1 Platform. “That was kind of our first exposure to how Salesforce was used in a much bigger way than just CRM,” says Harbin.

Shortly after the visit, UFCU began its own shift to the Salesforce1 Platform. One of the first steps was bringing together the data from several of their siloed legacy systems to create a centralized 360-degree view of their customer. UFCU is also using Salesforce1 Platform, with various AppExchange apps, to manage sales pipeline, referrals, member cases, and much more.

Read on to hear specifics from Harbin on how all of this innovation was, and continues to be, possible for him and his IT department.

1. Removing the roadblocks.

“When I think about the process of building an application, there are a lot of things that you would typically have to do in the creation process, including: where you’re going to go host it, what you’re going to do with the code, how are you going to secure it, how are you going to handle user authentication, and then how are you going to make sure it’s open enough so you can scale it across channels.

All of those things are done for us with Salesforce, so we really get to dream about the possibilities and how we can actually solve business problems. Salesforce makes the things that were very slow and difficult to do before, possible.”

2. Making integration simple.

“The data integration piece I found was very easy. What we do is synchronize the entire Salesforce database to an internal warehouse using Riptide on a daily basis. There we aggregate all of our data from all of our other siloed and legacy applications into a file that we can synchronize with Salesforce on a regular basis.

This creates that 360-degree view where all that data is in one place. We also have done a lot of integrations with the real time APIs for things like the last ten transactions. So if somebody is in Salesforce and wants to see the last ten transactions this member has done, they click a button and the info is instantly there in real-time.” 

3. Eliminating security concerns.

“We have really bitten off a lot in putting almost 100% of our member data in the cloud with Salesforce. One of the big barriers typically in doing that is getting past the security and the compliance questions. We assembled a risk and compliance team internally to take a look at that.

We sat down and were quite amazed at the level of security and the robustness of the platform as it related to protection of data. It’s taken very seriously at Salesforce. We have a lot of trust in that. So we really eliminated security and compliance as a barrier right off the bat, so we could further innovate.”

4. Providing a mobile ready option.

“We are just in our infancy of going live and mobile is very quickly on our roadmap. One of the things we wanted to do is make it easy to use the solution so we implemented a single sign-on with the online portion right out of the gate. What we’re working on now is making sure that our entire process is the same across all channels.

I’m excited about the Salesforce1 announcement and really embracing the platform across mobile, being able to use all of our customizations and the things that we did online, on mobile. I think once again it’s going to elevate the necessity for the platform to a whole another level. People will have it with them at all time.”

This 'Share Your Success' project is a blog series that spotlights a customer story. Feel free to Share Your Success story with us and be in the next blog post. 

Learn about how you can use the Salesforce1 Platform to innovate faster at your company by reading this free ebook.