Dreamforce 2015 - Deloitte Digital’s Day 1 Wrap Up

First up we saw Deloitte Digital CTO, Bill Briggs, and Principal, John Peto, speak on How Deloitte Digital is Breathing New Life into Legacy Core Systems. The idea behind the session is explained in detail in this blog post and focused on the premise that businesses are realizing that they shouldn’t think of their legacy backend data systems as obsolete in a cloud-first world. Bill and John gave examples of how Deloitte is helping CIOs use Salesforce to tap into those legacy systems, giving that data new life within Salesforce, and generating more value from those legacy investments. “Legacy systems need not be an albatross.” said Bill Briggs, “With the exponential pace of business change, we don’t have a choice.”

After lunch we explored the Ultimate Digital Engagement Platform with Deloitte Digital Principal, Barbara Venneman, who invited representatives from Adobe and Salesforce to the stage to take part in a panel that talked to the customer journey and how important it is that between every step of the sales path there is tight integration between platforms and partners to generate maximum engagement and ROI. Some of the most meaningful engagements the panellists have had with senior leaders at businesses they consult to have been where comparisons have been made with competitive customer journeys. Personalized engagement with customers needs to be predictive, robust and real-time.

In a session with Dell Boomi on cyber risk, we were taken through the steps needed to mitigate incident across digital platforms. Cyber risk is not something that can be eliminated. What needs to happen is businesses need to be enlightened on how to manage it. Clients must grow and innovate, sharing information in this economy is imperative to combat cyber-attacks and people should be trusted delegates were told. Deloiite Digital’s approach in partnership with Dell is to secure through a measured, risk-based approach and be vigilant and resilient by preparing for incidents.

Big data, predictive analytics and personalization are ever-present themes in digital right now, so the presentation on Deloitte Digital’s Patient Connect platform called Enriching the Therapy Lifecycle was timely as Principal, Chris Zant and Senior Manager, Anatoli Zurablev, took delegates through the issues driving the need for better patient care in the pharmaceutical industry and showed how it’s possible to deliver personalized care while not stepping over any PII regulations set out by the government.

Elsewhere in the Metreon, Josh Bersin, Founder and Principal, Bersin by Deloitte, and Erica Volini, National HR Technology Lead, Deloitte Consulting spoke on Employee Engagement at the Irresistible Organization. The two explored the number one issue that keeps HR professionals up at night – employee  engagement. Josh and Erica took a deep dive into their research to explain to a rapt audience how companies can create environments that are not just places that people want to work, but are truly "Simply Irresistible Organizations".

As the sun started setting on day 1 here at Dreamforce, speakers George Collins, Principal at Deloitte Digital, Sudarsan Thattai, CIO at Lineage, Uri Sarid, CTO at Mulesoft, and Eli Collins, Chief Technologist at Cloudera, gathered on a panel entitled: Digital Transformation: How Lineage is redefining the Logistics Industry where we heard how Lineage is innovating via progressive technologies from event-streaming devices to Digital engagement platforms, with both Salesforce and Heroku at the heart of the action. We left understanding that digital transformation in the logistics industry is an opportunity to organize supply and demand, and get to a place where customers have total visibility into the supply chain.

Finally, today we announced that Deloitte Digital's FastLean product, a Salesforce Fullforce Solution for manufacturing built on the Salesforce Platform, is now integrated with Apttus, a leading quote-to-cash service offering provider.