salesforce.com g-cloud – Cloud Computing Best Practices

Cloud Best Practices key to Salesforce.com on G-Cloud

As announced here Salesforce.com has joined the UK G-Cloud program.

Cloud Best Practices are key to the successful adoption of the platform by the public sector, in two main regards:

Information Security

In this presentation, Peter Coffee, VP Platform Research for Salesforce.com presents on the SaaS giants offerings for government, covering topics such as:

Business transformation success stories – Such as the San Francisco Family Service Agency building a case management app and reducing paperwork.

Social enterprise architecture – How their recent acquisitions like Rypple and tools like Chatter enable more social media collaboration.

Identity security – How Salesforce.com ensures identity security for government compliance.

He describes a number of best practices like Identity security, and how they are available for implementation to ensure compliance with various regulatory requirements that the public sector faces.

Use case modules – Sharing Cloud best practices

Salesforce.com is ideal for literally sharing best practices, through their Apps Store. I.e. One public sector agency can pioneer how best to implement a particular business process, and it’s likely agencies throughout the world have the same requirements.

So being able to easily create and share these modules is the ideal way for government agencies to collaborate throughout the world and share Cloud Best Practices.

For example if we consider possible applications for a given city in Canada, let’s say Hamilton.

From a quick scan of their web site, programs and services prompts some early ideas for ‘low hanging fruit’ for where this new GovCloud Apps Store might be targeted.

Like all other government agencies, they are tasked with more Open Government, better interaction with citizens online via social media, and so forth… aka GovCloud 2.0.

Key areas to apply these new technologies are where they can be used to better improve innovation and streamline bureaucracy, eliminating the Red Tape that stands in the way of new entrepreneurs and their innovation.

The City of Hamilton offers a plethora of many forms for workflows relevant to helping the city grow more innovation, like ‘BizPal‘ as part of a One Stop Shop.

These are great areas to deploy these new types of Cloud applications, where they can not only automate them into online e-services, but also use more of the social aspects for `crowdsourcing’ approaches.

For example the City Owned Property listing could be opened up to an online community approach, where assets are listed and citizens can propose new ideas online, voting them up and down to trigger investments in more citizen-designed initiatives.

These scenarios highlight the commercial opportunity for Canada, and any other country, that these developments present. I.e. These use cases could be created here in Canada by local small businesses to meet these local requirements, and then delivered to giant customers worldwide, like the UK government.