Challenge

• The Texas Department of Information Resources provides policy, planning, and education guidance to all Texas state agencies, as well as institutions of higher education and other publicly funded entities
• The Texas Department of Information Resources wanted to replace cumbersome manual processes, such as contract management, that were affected by the usual manual pitfalls and inconsistencies
• Sought a cloud computing solution that was in line with the Texas 2010-2014 State Strategic Plan for Information Resources Management

Solution

• Chose Unlimited Edition for several reasons
The cost was attractive, easily supported by a business case, and did not require a high priced technical staff to implement and configure
The initial investment could be leveraged to deploy additional functionality with no additional cost
The speed at which applications could be built, integrated with an existing data warehouse, and deployed with the Force.com cloud platform was much faster than in projects with traditional on-premise technologies.
• Built the following applications
Contract Governance/Operations Management for Texas.Gov – used to track all operations required to effectively manage the contract for the state’s official portal
Data Center Services Application – used by data center service representatives to track and manage daily activities with customers
Financial Budgeting, Planning and Reporting – used to manage the annual budget-planning process
IT Asset Tracking – used to track equipment deployed to users
IT Change Management and Status Reporting – used to track enhancements made by IT
IT Project and Portfolio Management – used by IT for tracking open and closed projects
Legislative Bill Tracking and Management –used to organize and track the department’s input on bills and impact analyses
Strategic Initiative Management – used for managing and tracking agency roadmap initiatives
Sunset Commission Review Management – used to track and manage correspondence and activities between the department and the Sunset Commission
Telecom Leasehold Management – used to manage facilities-based lease agreements
Trouble Ticketing – used to track internal help-desk activity that originates outside the help-desk call center managed by Dell
Trouble Ticketing Interface – integrated Force.com with the Dell help desk so that tickets requiring resolution on site are automatically populated in the department’s resolver queue
Vendor Contract Management – used by the contracting and procurement services division as the contract management tool for over 750 technology contracts
• Integrated applications with a data warehouse, a business intelligence platform, and Microsoft SharePoint
• Rolled out the new applications to more than 200 users
• Derived additional value from Salesforce.com Premier Support
• Extended the functionality of the Force.com platform by downloading DreamFactory’s SnapShot admin tool from the AppExchange
• Maintaining Force.com applications with one dedicated employee, who attended salesforce.com Training & Certification, and two part-time employees

Results

• Force.com cloud computing applications deliver a positive ROI and decreasing costs; they favorably compare to legacy on-site applications that feature increasing costs and annual maintenance billing
• Discovered that the more applications that are built on Force.com, the greater the cost avoidance
• Painless integrations with a data warehouse, a business intelligence platform, a Dell help desk, and Microsoft SharePoint
• Users are extremely pleased with salesforce.com’s mobile functionality
• Employees can access applications remotely without the additional cost of a VPN (virtual private network) or the need to add more capacity