Hub Heroes: December 2017

For the month of December, we are proud to highlight the community contributions of Kathy Lueckeman and Florence Parodi. Thanks to Kathy and Florence for all you do!

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Kathy Lueckeman

Maryville University of Saint Louis
1. Two truths and one lie about you!

• I hold more than one Salesforce certification.
• I was the first higher ed customer who joined the Power of Us Hub.
• I have been given login credentials to more than 150 higher ed orgs.

2. Why is community important to you? What motivates you to contribute?

I credit the Salesforce community with my success in learning the platform and I’m not exaggerating when I say that Salesforce changed my life. As I meekly entered the community with my 10 free Enterprise Edition licenses, I was invited to the Higher Ed Cloud Org, the precursor to the Power of Us Hub. Through that Chatter feed, I learned about Banner integration from the masters at Northeastern University, Marty Chang (now with Slalom Consulting), Vanessa Wright (now with Salesforce.org) and Nick Zinser (now with Huron Consulting). Having easy access to data was empowering and it liberated me from the frustration of ordering reports from IT. From that point on, I was hooked on learning from the community.

Then, as I was elbows-deep in my first implementation for Wayne State’s one-stop, Jonathan Maher (formerly at Fresno Pacific and now with Huron Consulting) posted a how-to video on custom buttons at the very moment I needed it. I still praise his name for that timely video.

About the same time, I attended my first Dreamforce and met the dot-com community, who generously answered my all-too-basic product questions in a series of late-night posts after each day of the conference.

Many of the early community pioneers became part of a small group I convened every Friday to share what we did that week. We were a young community but we sure learned a lot from each other and, from that humble beginning, we became the Higher Education Advisory Council.

Just more than a year after my first go-live and as we started the council conference calls, Colleen Whelan (formerly at Yale University and now at Providence College) invited me to speak at Yale’s CIO Summit. It was this event that inspired me to hold the first Higher Ed Summit while I was at Wayne State. Without Colleen, folks, we wouldn’t be getting together in D.C. next year for our sixth annual event. Talk about the power of the community!

It’s probably obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: Salesforce is a way of life for me and the community is my Ohana, my family.

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Florence Parodi

University of Miami
Twitter Handle: @madeinSFlorida

1. Two truths and a lie about you!

• I hiked in the clouds.
• I was president of the debate club.
• I have gone shark tagging.

2. Why is community important to you? What motivates you to contribute?

Seven years ago, I attended my first Dreamforce when all the Salesforce higher education users could fit into a much smaller room compared to today. Community at that time was physically tracking down your colleagues to get their email addresses. Since then, I have been privileged to experience the power and growth of this community from our humble beginnings in the Higher Ed Chatter site to the Power of Us Hub, and the creation of a community-driven architecture (HEDA) to the first Higher Education Open-Source Community Sprint. Many say, it takes a village; I would say, it takes a community. The important distinction here is that a village implies that you need to be in close physical proximity, whereas our community has no bounds.

The feeling of community and being exposed to this culture made me believe in myself and my ability to be successful professionally. As an accidental system administrator, the willingness to engage and share empowered me to evolve my career. When I think of “community,” a few words come to mind: learning, sharing, support, and collaboration. All of these continue to motivate me to both ask and answer the hard questions of our community.

I truly feel that the bonds that have blossomed because of our community will be life-long. #Ohana

 

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