Slack, the “New” Enterprise UI?
At Dreamforce last week there were two announcements that overshadowed the rest in my opinion, Salesforce Genie, which I already covered here; and Slack Canvas. I guess I shouldn’t just discuss Slack Canvas though, there were several Slack enhancements of interest and also a tie back into the Genie announcement. Slack and Salesforce customers are clearly benefiting from the acquisition, the investment of resources and linkage to the overall strategy really show. So before I get to the Canvas announcement, here’s what else was announced:
Slack huddles: This announcement is both a process shift and a set of new features. The process shift is really applying what Salesforce refers to as swarming, to other parts of the business. I call it collaborative incident management and wrote about it here. The basic concept is bringing the “right” group of people together to own and solve a customer issue, and in the Salesforce Service Cloud example, Slack is the collaboration tool that enables the “swarm”. The demo during the Dreamforce Keynote was with the sales team, and is referred to as a “huddle”; but it could be used in any business function to assemble a team to address the subject at hand. The new features include group video, multi-person screen sharing and message threading. These new features enhance Slack’s ad hoc group collaboration capabilities, including video.
New Slack Platform: The new Slack platform was originally announced last year and is now available for developers. The enhancements included what was announced last year, but added and/or extended several features. Most new features are centered around the workflow builder, and included modular reusable workflow building blocks that make custom automation easier and faster to create. There’s a new library of customizable workflow templates that provide a starting point for many common tasks like PTO requests and approval, helpdesk requests, incident response, contract approvals, etc. Workflows can be initiated in several ways now, including event-driven, user selection and scheduled.
Slack Partner Industry Solutions: The new program provides industry specific partner developed applications on Slack. The Slack-certified consulting partners include Accenture, Atrium, Capgemini, Deloitte, Globant, IBM, KPMG, NeuraFlash, PwC, Silverline and Slalom.
All three of these announcements are available now.
Slack Canvas
Slack Canvas, which won’t be available until next year, is a new collaborative shared workspace that moves Slack from messaging app to full team collaborative tool, or as Salesforce calls it, the “Digital HQ”. The real-time workspace helps teams co-create, collaborate and share documents / information, bring in outside data, automate tasks and generally work together to move activities and tasks forward. If you know Salesforce’s product portfolio, this might sound very similar to Salesforce Quip, a product and company they acquired from now Co-CEO Brett Taylor a few years ago. You wouldn’t be wrong, but it’s not a Quip competitor, it is instead the merging of Slack and Quip into a new offering that has much broader capabilities. The workspaces, or Canvasses, can be associated with a Slack channel, be shared like a channel, connect inside and outside the company like a current channel, and embed a variety of formats from video to documents to external assets like YouTube channels and videos.
Enterprise User Interface
I’ve used Slack for over 7 years and have watched it evolve from simple messaging / chat platform to something much more. All businesses have a lot of software tools but many of them are highly specialized to a few people’s jobs, and aren’t widely used across the business. The more integrated organizations become though, the more individuals need something from the other systems that they don’t routinely use. It might be as simple as approvals or access to some specific data sets, whatever it is, you have only a few options. You can learn the system and do whatever you need yourself, ask someone that uses the system for whatever you need, or maybe utilize some sort of process automation or workflow tool to have limited need to interact with the system. None of those solutions are optimal, and can create anything from an annoyed coworker to a very frustrated employee.
A simple example will illustrate what I mean. When I was chief research officer at G2 we implemented Salesforce Service Cloud to track all customer service requests. Once the ticket was entered it was routed to the team responsible for the issue, customer success, help desk or research team. In addition my research analyst and management team supported our account teams and were often brought into opportunities for various reasons. This also was done in Salesforce, but in Sales Cloud and Chatter. The analysts used those systems fairly regularly and developed good familiarity with them. For managers, directors, VPs and me though, we only used the systems randomly and infrequently. Most of the people that didn’t use the system frequently struggled, and add to that we were a startup and certainly not over resourced. Even a simple thing like approving certain types of ticket resolutions was painful, time consuming and maybe not always handled in a timely manner. There was a small group of resolutions that required my approval, things like adding a new category of software, moving a vendor to a different or additional category, or dealing with a vendor’s listing correctly post acquisition. It wasn’t a difficult task, but I often struggled with it because I only used the system infrequently and the sequence of actions I needed to execute was not intuitive to me. It was a constant source of frustration and I often put it off until the pressure of a deadline made me log in. I needed a way to interact with the task in a system that I used regularly and felt comfortable with. Slack added the Slack bot and integrated other applications into its environment, Asana, for example. We used Asana and the integration saved me from using Asana directly a great deal of the time. The things I did in Asana, I did frequently and reaped direct benefit from the system but for infrequent tasks or updates I relied on Slack.
After Slack was acquired by Salesforce I was curious to see how integrated Slack would be into the Salesforce product suite and if the integrations would increase across other enterprise products. Moving Slack beyond a messaging app and into a work environment where lot’s of activities can be accomplished, all with a familiar and very clean UI seemed like a natural path of evolution. The number of integration to other apps has continued to grow and with the addition of the new platform features, huddles, industry specific capabilities and Canvas (next year anyway), the concept that many people can work mostly in Slack could be a reality.
Working in a clean, familiar environment for most tasks and activities simplifies onboarding, increases productivity and could improve both employee and customer experience. It doesn’t replace other apps, the functions are still needed underneath the “UI” and some jobs need the depth of functionality of that underlying solution, but reducing the number of systems you need to interact with directly while adding automation, workflow, intelligence and collaboration capabilities has a strong value proposition for most businesses.
