Business intelligence is a fundamental and essential business growth consultant for organizations to be more productive and efficient. This meetup discussion will help your organization to achieve goals and increase its capacity of driving sustainable growth.

In this meetup, Shane Leese, head of data & analytics at Seven Peaks Software, shared his knowledge about business intelligence (BI), the impacts on data and analytics team members, and the usage of Slack for different business functions. Following that, Mario Ross Cox, Slack’s or Salesforce’s Enterprise Account Executive, explained how Slack could help the organization use and analyze data for better workflows.

Basically, data is the key to digital transformation. The implementation can cause positive impacts across all of the business units, whether it be on the working processes, people allocation, or organizational systems.

Each organization needs better technology to drive fundamental change. So, digital transformation provides the organization’s chance to stay ahead of the competition by increasing productivity and efficiency.

Additionally, the data system is constantly generating, and it is growing exponentially. According to the International Data Corporation or IDC, the sum of the world’s data – the DataSphere, has a compound annual growth rate of around 61%, which will increase to 175ZB in 2025 or higher in the future.

Apart from the data growth rate, engineers and developer engineers think that data is still necessary to drive business growth. When people are doing business, they still need centralized data to deliver and manage across the company.

This means that people in the organization need to access all of the data and information from one cloud database. Digital transformation helps people in the company find accurate information and be more productive and efficient.

Accordingly, business needs tools to manage this data deluge and to grant access to one centralized data storage and infrastructure.

Hence, to drive a successful digital transformation project, businesses should apply a reliable tool, Business Intelligence, which can reassure them that the operation is going to be successful.

Business intelligence is the brain of the organization. BI shares and analyzes knowledge, messages, and processes of data. For example, BI is essential in terms of reporting on the organization’s roles and performance and tracking the business metrics.

BI is helping you to compare and analyze data and report. You will see a clearer picture of the company by forecasting the business operations point of view. It also increases the opportunity for coming up with new business strategies to make the business more profitable and successful.
BI also helps to link the team members together for greater strategic goals’ data and shares sources of truth.

Consequently, BI is one of the business growth consultants that help the company to optimize performance and drive better decision-making.

This structure could help the company to lower the time of making a decision, driving the business with different units, and supporting systems. This could bring the team members together, and team members are able to share information and knowledge easier.

This structure is helping the organization to analyze each individual team. It will create and keep both data to get things done as much as quicker for the stakeholders with building along the infrastructures while also getting the resources that they need. However, the cost may be high because this structure needs to build more advanced things in terms of data science. This structure could well increase its growth when it is related to the technical data roles.

This structure retains centralized leadership and strategic vision embedded in the team members. The team members will know what is going on each day or day-to-day activities.

To explain, BI is a business growth consultant, and it is similar to internal consultants. One team is able to know the other teams to get the tasks or projects done as fast as possible. This could drive a greater initial, trust, and process of making a decision.

A problem is that it is difficult to see the resources from the other departments when you are going to take on a bigger task or project. So, this structure allowed people to swap up the members of the teams. For example, you will balance the quick response, support, and report from the data within the organization.

Source Slack

Here is one of the best supporting tools for a better workflow, named ‘Slack’. This tool provides data management and helps you to reduce the middle gap between conversation and productivity. The users will be in a cloud console of the collaboration platforms, which will be users’ BI and data tools. This allows users to work, edit, and share the data together at any time and anywhere.

Basically, slack’s concept comes from during the COVID-19 pandemic when people tend to work as a hybrid rather than onsite. This pandemic increases the difficulty of communication within the organization. From this point, Slack is one of the ways for the organization to reduce the gap in communication and increase the ability to work from anywhere. Slack could help the team members cooperate effectively.

Slack is a digital headquarter located in the middle of the company’s system. People within the organizations are able to interact and communicate with the team members or even with the customers. Apart from this, people who are using Slack to communicate do not have to switch their screens to jump to other applications or programs because Slack is serving interactions, such as texting, sending files, and making a schedule, in one place!

According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey (2022), out of approximately 70,000 developers who are using synchronous tools, respondents think that Slack is the best solution for technical usage rather than Google, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. It provides various technical support forms for the engineers. Those technical supports include engineers, machine learning engineers, and other technical people. Overall, the most love comes from professional developer engineers.

As Slack is a business growth consultant for the company, the main component is messaging. It enhances everyone’s capacity to communicate efficiently within the company. Users are able to create the channels and include all people involved in the specific project.

People who are in the channels on Slack are able to add and remove team members. After adding the team members to the channels, all of the users can search and access that is shared by using Slack Connect where all of the users will get the right Slack data across the channels and world, such as direct messages, information, and files at the same amount of time.

Source Slack

It is focusing on integration to help users to be connected and to create valuable things. For example, companies and customers are able to change things, such as systems, works, and actions. So, Slack could help you to make better conversations with the team members or customers.
For the employees’ impacts, Slack could help everyone in the company to focus on significant and valuable tasks. This could help everyone in the company to be more productive and efficient.

Overall, it helps to collaborate and share insights on the data with external and internal organizations or even third parties. This could help to keep all of the stakeholders aligned.

Additionally, Slack helps the organization to be more connected with third parties. This could help the customers or third parties to stay up-to-date on the process of the products and services. The organization’s transparency and reliability also increase towards the third parties.

However, in terms of business leaders, when people are connected with each other within the organization, it helps everyone in the company to share a greater amount of ideal information and be easier. Slack helps the business leader to gain significant information and make a decision more quickly.

Some of you may believe that email is the most viable option for communication, but it is excessively slow and requires switching between numerous programs in order to transmit files or copy and paste the text. Slack is providing easy accessibility to Google, Zoom, and MS team. Users are also able to make both video and voice calls via Slack. Consequently, Slack could help you to save a bit more time.

In addition, compared to employing slack, it allows teams or users to be more productive and efficient and save in the amount of time spent because users will get up to date faster as they are able to see the list on automatic boarding.

Source Slack

Getting up-to-date with the newest data and organization’s metrics are necessary. In this staying updated, Slack will contain the most important and newest for both information and metrics, especially for e-commerce, smart applications, and IT.

Last but not least, Ai is yet another feature on Slack that maximizes search functionality and aids users in finding items within Slack’s contextuality. So, if the data is the old update or more than 2 days old, this old data may be unnecessary. AI will be powered to recommend taking the actions of driving the results to keep updated with the newest data.

This application is allowing all of the users in the channels to see the latest data and information. It helps users to take a shorter time to collect the newest data and information.

Source Slack

It will alert and monitor automatically the users who have got comments or when they need something to fix. In the meantime, they are able to reply or respond to the comments immediately.

In terms of doing business, if you are doing a project or building something, the business leaders are able to look at the metrics and comments on Slack’s channels directly. It is also being tracked and monitors the users. Tracking users within centralized channels is avoiding errors during the deployment processes by integrating the CI/CD in Slack’s tools.

It also integrates various tools in the channels. Slack brings the DevOps tools into the channel to illustrate the transparency, and real-time, end-to-end status updates of the SDLC processes. You will be able to see what is going on and the overall picture of the organization.

Slack’s key point is to help the engineers to share their codes and get both the questions and answers. From this part, the engineers are able to share the data with their team members.

People in any team can use or do anything that is technical because Slack provides easy ways to fix code. For instance, if there are any issues or some codes fail, all of these issues could be brought into Slack. Moreover, users can roll back and add or remove the new code to make a better deployment of the code.

The company’s workflows will get better thanks to Slack. It makes it simpler for users and staff to carry out and manage business processes. So, this application helps resolve problems faster and build out new products faster.

Users are able to work together with team members from anywhere in the world. They can create and collaborate to analyze the data via various data tools, such as Excel, Databricks, Looker, and Jenkins. Users will focus more on their work because users do not have to switch between many tools.

For a greater and easier collaboration to share code base and data with branching and version control. Consequently, users can see the visualization of the reports clearly and respond to and recheck the reports before publishing.

Creating channels’ design for delivering a report and getting the data alerts. Adding a bot is to answer the text of basic questions for everyone within the channels to serve convenience.

The BI platform is helping to update the newest data and reports. In other words, it is data-driven and not data-obsessed. This could help the users to know what to do and keep focusing on their tasks.

Moreover, this helps the organization to save costs as the resources and reports usually take time to build and gain. Furthermore, the particular information could take a large space to load up the data.

Can be easily visualized for texting, scheduling, and reusing code. This helps the users to get the update in one place and could increase the organization for a better flow. In addition, when something needs to be changed or goes wrong, it will alert the channels immediately.

People usually come up with various aspects of the question which they may discuss within the team. This will help the users to gather the data for better metrics. This also increases the greater data literacy and ends up with the best solution rather than arguing. Consequently, users will find the value and end up with the same vision and solution for the same business goals.