Slingshot’s Digital Workplace Gets Smarter
New data catalog enables teams to generate real-time snapshots of their performance, processes, and profitability to make knowledge-driven decisions.
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Slingshot, the digital workplace from software company Infragistics, has announced the first solution to enable everyday business users to easily see what data their organization possesses, access and analyze it the moment they need it, and use it to guide informed business decisions. Using Slingshot’s new Data Catalog, companies can now bring together all data sources that track performance, process, people, and profitability across departments, platforms, and channels all in one place. As a result, teams can easily generate visual snapshots of their work in real time or over time to better understand and drive action using data.
Whether they know it or not, most companies today are data companies, collecting information daily on everything from customers and products to marketing and sales. However, for many organizations, this data is spread across multiple systems, channels, and gatekeepers and requires analysis to make it actionable. As a result, teams don’t have a quick, holistic lens into the data they need and are put into a position to make critical business decisions without it. This often leads to decisions based on gut instincts -- or worse, the most senior or loudest person in the room.
Slingshot set out to solve this once and for all by bringing the power of an integrated business intelligence (BI) machine into teams’ everyday workflows, allowing everyone within the organization to not only access data all in one place, but to analyze it through the creation of visual dashboards. Unlike other BI tools, Slingshot’s Data Catalog is designed specifically for business users, making data a natural part of team collaboration.
Bring Intelligence and Data from Multiple Sources into the Place Teams Are Already Working
Teams are already working in Slingshot to manage projects, communicate, store, and share content critical to their work. Now, they can also track performance and progress around this work in the same platform.
Slingshot brings together analytics from multiple data sources, including databases and spreadsheets (e.g., Excel and Google Sheets), SaaS systems, big data and cloud data products (e.g., Google Analytics, BigQuery, and Snowflake), and financial, marketing and sales tools (e.g., Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, and Marketo).
The new data catalog functionality acts as an organization’s single source of trusted information. Key business insights that were previously siloed and held behind gatekeepers due to job functions and seniority now exist in one place.
Teams Can Organize and Visualize Data in a Way That Makes Sense to Them
Not all teams need the same data. Slingshot users can choose what they want to access and organize it by department (e.g., sales, marketing, product, HR, finance), product or offering, channel (Google, LinkedIn, Instagram), system (e.g., payroll, CRM, people management), and so on. The data is easily searchable, so teams can find what they need exactly when they need it.
They can then generate visualizations to understand the metrics that tell the story of their performance and progress.
Everyday Business Users Don’t Need to Be Data Scientists to Understand the Numbers That Influence Their Work
When teams hear the word “data,” they often think of complex numbers and equations that can only be fully understood by a data scientist. However, teams work with data every day, from sales numbers and marketing performance to employee productivity goals and customer sentiment. Often, the biggest problem teams face in deriving value from this information is that they only see bits and pieces of the wider company performance. To make impactful decisions, teams -- regardless of their specific function -- need a bird’s-eye view into the organization.
With Slingshot, any business user -- or employee without prior data analysis experience -- can go from spreadsheets of raw data to multisource visualizations in just minutes. When connected directly to outside sources, these dashboards update in real time. This helps them to analyze data from across the organization to identify trends, assess performance, and forecast the next best steps for a given project or the business.
Integrate Data into Teams’ Daily Workflows to Drive Better Decisions
Because data is neatly organized, indexed, and readily available for use in Slingshot, teams can move it directly into the projects they’re working on. For example, a team member can create a data visualization, take a screenshot, and annotate it before sharing it with the wider team for further discussion. This allows teams to go from insight to collaboration to decisions -- and workback as needed -- all in one place.
By doing this, Slingshot brings data to the center of every organization. There are no decisions based on one person’s opinion or guess. Teams are empowered to make data-driven decisions that drive productivity and business growth.
“The digital workplace of the future must put data at the center of collaboration in order to introduce data-driven cultures that will drive the results companies want,” said Dean Guida, founder of Slingshot. “Although a lot of people work on the assumption that data is out of reach or the domain of data teams alone, we’re making it clear that data is any metric that tells the story of individual, team, and organizational performance and progress. Empowering everyday business users with this knowledge is an essential first step to changing the way teams make decisions and get work done.”
Slingshot is available as a desktop app (Mac and Windows) and mobile app (Apple App Store and Google Play) and via slingshotapp.io.