You have probably encountered (or are expecting/fearing it if you have not implemented Slack yet in your organization) some push back from co-workers who are happy with their current use of gmail, skype & co for communication and are resistant to change.

Apart from banning all other forms of communications — which we are not sure is the best solution — , a good way to get your organization started with Slack is to give them an immediate reward for using it, fixing something which is currently not working and would make their life easier.

make their life easier with Slack, start fixing an existing issue

A good way to achieve that is starting with business metrics reporting by making Slack the main way to access this information.

We have observed indeed that most of business dashboards are not working as they should, many BI projects assume that “if you build it, they will come”, ending up with dashboard nobody read or take decisions based upon. Current dashboard solutions are time consuming, not practical enough and not designed for collaboration: who wants to login from their desktop to a dedicated web reporting system (after trying to remember what the password is), then go through pages of reports to find the kpi you need? Who can read this 20 pages pdf report that was sent to your email box on a mobile screen? Who can keep track or share insights sending individual emails to co-workers?

A big barrier to efficient BI usage is the way current BI solutions are designed, completely separated from the internal company channels. BI companies have focused mainly on how to connect to as much data as possible, on ways to show huge amounts of data in as many formats as possible but they have not focused enough — if at all — on how to deliver the information efficiently and promote collaboration and decision taking based on this information. This is where Slack can help you and demonstrate its value to you co-workers.

help them save time and take better decisions

As a conclusion, build or migrate your inefficient dashboards & business metrics to Slack and make your co-workers see the benefits.

Start small, expand and end up making Slack your main communication tool. If everything goes well it will probably be your co-workers who are going to lead most of the Slack usage expansion!

How to start? I have no budget for building a new BI solution

Good news, you do not need any budget and can start building your dashboard in less than 5 minutes.

Have a look at Datacard.io a free solution that connects to most of your digital solutions (Google Analytics, Social, eCommerce, emailing, …) and sends notifications to your Slack channel to replace traditional dashboards.

And let us know if you get your co-workers to adopt Slack!