AMA: Knowledge Vortex Salesforce Functional Analyst, Bridget Hudacs on Technology Management

To negotiate relationships with technology vendors, the short answer is: come to the table prepared. Know the (rough) amount of licenses that you're looking to acquire. You don't have as much negotiating power if you're looking for 1 or 2 licenses compared to 10+. Know what you're looking for with a technology solution: What are your non-negotiables? What are you willing to negotiate or trade off on? Understand what the competitors have to offer. Perhaps they have a capability that you're intere ...Read More

My experience with blending legacy systems and new technology is to use a middleware to integrate the two. With middleware integrations, there are a few best practices that I support: Limited admins. Have you been in a system where every user is an admin? Seamless integrations are the big reason (especially if you receive pushback on limiting administrator access to tools) to limit who has access to adjust back end settings in a system. Well-meaning people can disrupt integrations by "just addin ...Read More

I constantly look at the ROI and/or impacts of outcomes, and discuss those with the key stakeholders before moving forward with customization. What I have found is that people often present solutions without fully understanding the solution's impact on the rest of the tech stack/other users. When you discuss next steps in a positive way, you can get to the problem that they're trying to solve and find a better way to solve it. For example: "I got your request to do a real-time refresh of XYZ dat ...Read More

In terms of business growth and the tech stack: With customer growth, I want to ensure that the tools in the tech stack are robust enough for current and anticipated (2 - 3 years out) needs. I've been in situations where the company's use of a tool was too much for the tool to accommodate. You don't want systems erroring out because a tool you've chosen can't handle the workload that you provide. With employee growth, I want to ensure that I have as few tools as possible to accomplish business o ...Read More

To foster a culture of continuous improvement, foster a culture of collaboration: Encourage communication between team members and cross-functional teams. In the Kaizen philosophy, you can't improve a process if you're not doing it day-to-day. Listen, and give credibility to, the challenges of those who do the work. The "perfect" solution on paper may not actually work the best in practice. Focus your team on finding ways to make processes 10% better, rather than finding a perfect solution. In K ...Read More