Elements.cloud: Accelerating Change Through Efficient Metadata Management

Follow Elements.cloud on :

Elements.cloud

Ian Gotts, Founder and CEO, Elements.cloudIan Gotts, Founder and CEO
In the current business climate, change is necessary for enterprises to stay ahead of the pack. With dynamic releases from platforms like Salesforce, and enterprises developing their own customizations, keeping track of all the changes for impact and risk analysis becomes an arduous task. These changes result in the accumulation of increasingly diverse business analysis and development configuration documentation. The configuration of most applications is now through metadata. To this end, enterprise metadata management has become one of the most important practices for a successful digital strategy and the cornerstone of effective change management. However, complex integrated architectures create silos, making it difficult for cross-organizational co-operation, enterprise data and change management. Organizations also suffer from over-reliance on manual practices, and poor documentation, that make metadata management cumbersome and increases technical debt. Ultimately, it slows innovation.

Elements.cloud addresses metadata management issues with its change intelligence platform, enabling clients to gain complete visibility of all automated and manually created documentation and processes, to drive change.

“Our platform offers visibility to stakeholders enabling them to make better risk-based decisions that accelerates time to value” states Ian Gotts, Founder, and CEO of Elements.cloud.

We believe that you need to aggregate content from as many sources as possible and display in the context of a change to help enterprises understand the implications and risk of making those changes. That is why Elements.cloud is so powerful


The company’s change intelligence platform is a central repository for a variety of assets, including requirements, user stories, process maps, architecture diagrams, ERDs, org metadata dictionaries, impact analysis, and documentation. The platform plays a crucial role in helping teams understand business requirements and subsequently map out business processes to validate those requirements through its process mapping tool. Architectural diagrams can be drawn to help enterprises gain a comprehensive view of the solution design and

integrations. The pivotal handover from analysis to the development teams is the user story, and these are developed in Elements but kept in sync with apps like Jira. User stories can be grouped into a release to support the management of a roadmap. Finally, the change intelligence platform ties all the documentation to the metadata that is being changed in the different systems.

This gives visibility of the risks and potential conflicts far earlier in the change cycle, so resolving them 10x or 100x less cost than when in the changes hit production.

“We see organizations reducing risk analysis effort by 60% and development rework by over 30%. And this is just the start.” said Gotts With Elements’ change intelligence platform, enterprise stakeholders —business analysts, architects, development teams, and auditors— collaborate efficiently and work as a single integrated team to accelerate the time to value for platforms. It allows all team members to stay abreast of changes and be up to speed with the operations across departments. A common view of documentation is essential for teams working on the same metadata, concurrently. More importantly, the Elements platform generates automated documentation and metadata impact analysis through nightly synchronization of production and sandboxes. And the metadata dictionary enables any change documentation to be linked. This visibility enables organizations to make changes, at speed, and with more confidence. This supports best practices for reducing technical debt. In addition the change intelligence platform enables recommendations for clean up of metadata, and more.

The tools that provide metadata impact analysis cannot provide a definitive assessment of the risk. They cannot currently provide 100% analysis of how custom apps are configured, look inside the compiled code of packages or understand every integrated app. Any tool that claims to tell you that a change can be made with no risk should be looked at with skeptism.

“We believe that you need to aggregate content from as many sources as possible and display it in the context of a change to help enterprises understand the implications and risk of making those changes. That is why Elements is so powerful,” says Gotts.

The Elements.cloud platform connects knowledge content, wherever it is stored, and provides organizations’ teams with immediate access to the most up-to-date content. It saves them hours of frustration and wasted time searching for relevant documentation.

"We see organizations reducing risk analysis effort by 60% and development rework by over 30%. And this is just the start"

But that linked content could also be valuable training and support information for end users. Elements increases user adoption and engagement because it delivers in-app training content that includes notes, videos, PDFs, and web pages. Additionally, it can collect feedback inside the app, so support teams can respond to end user queries in real time. By quickly updating training content, it increased the end-users’ confidence further reinforcing the adoption cycle.

“Any enterprise that spends around half a million dollars on Salesforce licenses can readily understand the value an of our platform,” informs Gotts.

The industry analysts are now recongizing the importance of metadata management as an application space.

A recent report by InVisory researched the Change Intelligence Platform market for Salesforce and listed Elements.cloud as the front runner.

The Change Intelligence market is maturing quickly. Initially, it was a set of home-grown apps, enthusiast-developed utilities, and a few vendors with apps that were still MVP. The business needs and value was not well understood, at the same time the Salesforce implementations were smaller and less risky.

InVisory identified 6 vendors and named Elements.cloud the Front Runner because their platform provides support for the full implementation lifecycle. The other vendors are still supporting only a narrow scope centered on impact analysis. Only Elements.cloud’s provides the enterprise architecture capabilities that customers require to accelerate value from their Salesforce investment.

"Our platform offers visibility to stakeholders enabling them to make better risk-based decisions that accelerates time to value” states Ian Gotts, Founder, and CEO of Elements.cloud"

Testament to the platform’s effectiveness is the success story of an ISV partner of Salesforce, OwnBackup, which provides data protection solutions to enterprises. With a five-year-old org, OwnBackup wanted a major cleanup exercise to increase their agility. They had to analyze all of their Salesforce automations to streamline and uninstall packages that they no longer needed. Under normal circumstances, the cleanup exercise would have taken weeks of manual work to document, rebuild, test, and deploy. It also involved discovering the use of each field across all process builders, workflows, approvals, flows, and more. Elements.cloud provided an easy method to perform impact analysis of all their automation processes. The dependency trees allowed OwnBackup to visualize where metadata was referenced in other Salesforce metadata, giving them clarity on managed package connections. Elements’ analysis of OwnBackup’s applications offered greater visibility into the use of every field. Elements also assisted OwnBackup in documenting the impact of org changes and performing impact analysis within minutes, instead of the hours or days it used to take.

As Salesforce scales through the development platform Ian and acquistions, customers need a broader perspective for metadata management. And as Salesforce becomes a strategic platform connected to other enterprise applications, customers need a greater understanding of the metadata relationship between both Salesforce and all the other integrated systems. With the pace of change, the scale and complexity of Salesforce implementations, and the numbers of integrations to other apps, organizations need to perform automated analysis in order to excel in today’s competitive business environment. Elements’ change intelligence platform is one of the few platforms architected with the capabilities and vision to deliver tangible, lasting results for organizations across their IT landscape.

Read Also



Featured Vendors