… Or, What We Should Plug Into Slack, Teams, And Other Chat Platforms

Over the past decade, chat platforms have become a fixture of the workplace (yes, somehow it’s already been more than 10 years). This is due to them supporting rapid informal communication as well as their extensibility. For years, organizations have had success integrating systems of work into chat platforms, transforming processes, and creating better work experiences.

However, adoption of this extensibility has been limited to those with the technical know-how to integrate their work into chat platforms. Three factors are changing this, allowing anyone to bring work into chat tooling:

  1. Increased adoption of unified communications as a service (UCaaS) is bringing persistent team-based chat to more people.
  2. Platforms are increasing the availability of premade integrations.
  3. Chat tools are incorporating native no-code builders.

So, now we can easily incorporate work into chat tools, which begs the question, “What should we integrate?”

To make this process easier, we’ve put together a list of some of the most important basic integrations. There are, of course, more tools to integrate than just the vendors mentioned here, but we wanted to provide some quick examples of platforms (in alphabetical order) to guide this process (and if your company isn’t mentioned, I’m sorry).

I’ve also included links to Forrester Wave™ evaluations and other reports that have more inclusive coverage and examples of a tooling space:

Employee-Facing Workplace Services

  • Employee productivity

Examples include Google workspaces (Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.), Microsoft O365 (Outlook, Word, PPT, Excel, etc.), and more.

The Forrester Tech Tide™: Enterprise Collaboration Technologies, Q3 2022 Forrester report

  • Creativity tools

Examples include Adobe Creative Cloud (for file sharing), whiteboarding apps, lightweight design apps, and more.

  • Employee file systems

Examples include Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint, and more.

The Content Platforms Landscape, Q4 2022 Forrester report

  • Human capital management (HCM)

Examples include Oracle Cloud HCM, SAP SuccessFactors, Workday, and more.

The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Human Capital Management Suites, Q2 2020 Forrester report

  • Collaborative work management (CWM)

Examples include Adobe Workfront, Airtable, Asana, Atlassian (Trello, Confluence, JWM), ClickUp, Monday.com, Smartsheet, and more.

The Forrester Wave™: Collaborative Work Management Tools, Q4 2022 Forrester report

  • IT service management (ITSM) and enterprise service management (ESM)

Examples include Atlassian JSM, Freshworks, Ivanti Neurons, ServiceNow, and more.

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Management, Q4 2021 Forrester report

  • IT assistance virtual agents

Examples include Aisera, Amelia, Espressive, Moveworks, and more.

The Forrester Wave™: Chatbots For IT Operations, Q4 2022 Forrester report

  • Digital operations platforms (DOPs), aka modern ERP

Examples include Oracle Fusion Cloud and NetSuite, SAP, Workday, and more.

The Forrester Wave™: Digital Operations Platforms For Manufacturing And Distribution, Q3 2022 Forrester report

 

Customer-Facing Workplace Services

  • Customer relationship management (CRM)/customer success management (CSM)

Examples include HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, SAP, Zendesk, and more.

The Forrester Wave™: Core CRM Solutions, Q3 2022 Forrester report

 

Specialist Tools For Developers (Abbreviated List)

  • Code repos

Examples include Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab, and more.

  • Cloud (for self-service and administration)

Examples include AWS, Azure, GCP, and more.

  • Development planning

Examples include Atlassian Jira, Atlassian Trello, Asana, ClickUp, and more.

 

Specialist Tools For Operations Pros (Abbreviated List)

  • Incident management tools

Examples include Atlassian OpsGenie, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, and more.

  • Monitoring and AIOps tools

Examples include DataDog, Dynatrace, Splunk, ScienceLogic, and more.

  • Automation

Examples include RedHat Ansible, Terraform, and more.