As an organisation, Slack has always been on the lookout for the best ways to accelerate innovation and collaboration. Initially, it focused on the developer community, but its offerings have grown such that every business and employee can use digital technology to enhance efficiency and productivity.
The Slack platform wasn’t built in a lab for a particular market. It was actually a by-product of two disparate teams of developers working on a video game called Glitch, who needed to find better ways to collaborate.
The platform the teams created out of necessity became a de facto standard for the traditional enterprise culture of development and communicating on demand and in real-time. With the advent of the Slack platform, developers could bring their own workflows, and use it to share and distribute files, prototype projects and integrate tools, as well as provide the context around the communication. In that way, they were empowered to improve communication, find the best hacks and shortcuts, and streamline their workflows.
A developer platform for everyone — not just developers
Organisations are used to using email and have done so for over 30 years without ever really questioning if it’s the best way to communicate with colleagues and customers. For example, if there are over five people Ccing on one thread, it can clog an inbox with dozens of messages without actually helping the problem at hand.
Apps such as WhatsApp and iMessage have improved that mode of communication, but developers have been awake to better ways of communicating for some time now. Leaders in the IT space such as Xero and Australian success story Canva have implemented the Slack platform across their entire ecosystems.
This is partly down to Slack’s ability to create an inclusive space — not only for developers and engineers to code up tools and collaborate on the latest iteration of a particular app but also for those with less technical knowledge. Users have access to some 2,500+ apps that include a vast array of pre-created workflows and no-code solutions for things like logging employee attendance and expenses.
A great example of the way Slack plug-and-play tools can maximise productivity is how they enable organisations to interact with customers over a Slack Connect channel, which can streamline considerably the amount of communication that would have been involved over email. Instead of replicating the physical world — say with a digital version of an A4 sheet of paper in an Office 365 environment — Slack tools use AI and machine learning tools to accelerate communication between high-priority users and streamline the increasingly obsolete ways of doing business. (Of course, integration with Office 365 is there for those who like to work old-school.)
At the same time, every business has in effect become a digital business — whether in retail, education, entertainment or financial services, to name just a few industries. Technology has become all-pervasive and Slack’s tools and developer community are at the forefront of how digital business is being conducted, constantly challenging the status quo.
Tools for the 21st century
Slack’s app directory, analogous to the Apple App Store, has 2,500+ apps built by a community of developers including the likes of heavyweights such as Google, Zoom, and Atlassian. What this means in practice is that customers can go into the app directory and integrate with Zoom and share a document with Google Drive or OneDrive without the need for major end-user configuration.
Most of these apps are designed for everyday users, not developers, and can be used to share documents and video and audio communication seamlessly across channels.
Troops, for example, is a plug-and-play tool that allows a user to connect to a CRM and pull data into a Slack application. It can then run alerts when any significant deal has happened so all relevant staff know exactly what is going on — like an AI engine designed for your specific IT ecosystem.
Slack channels can be either open or private, though Slack encourages open communication so that users can pass their knowledge around freely, engendering collaboration and innovation. For example, this openness enables tools such as Search Learning Intelligence, which uses AI to provide users with the information they require based on previous usage and user profiles. In effect, the technology finds you.
Above all else, the Slack platform is a knowledge base which has been designed to make the most informed decisions possible about the specific information it provides to its users.
It also appreciates the value of automated workflows — not just from the perspective of speed-to-market for a developer, but for all businesses that need to get products and services to market before their competitors. Moreover, employees want to free up their time by automating the more mundane processes in their workplaces, and Slack’s automation tools are helping to make that a reality.
It’s not just a question of where and when employees work, but what tools they have at their disposal to do their jobs more effectively and enjoyably.
Finally, as Slack is now part of Salesforce, it is at the centre of a very large trailblazer community that brings lots of disparate skill sets with it. Together, Slack and Salesforce are expecting a great deal of highly beneficial innovation to occur over the next ten years and beyond.
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