Self-Service is for Gas
Ever wonder why the pages in presentations are called slides? Once upon a time, all over the world, corporate presentations were the realm of professional designers and artists. If you’re old enough, you might have even seen one of these in a conference room that wasn’t part of a Mad Men episode:
Putting together a presentation meant working with layout and typeset artists to put together your slides. It meant taking their layout boards to photographers who would copy them onto 35mm slides compatible with the slide projectors. You’d then have load the slides in the right order into the projector and show them in a dark room during your presentation. If you didn’t have an assistant to advance the slides for you, you’d need to sit close enough to the projector to push the buttons. Good luck speaking over the fan noise; those things weren’t always that quiet. But, hey, there was an upside: fewer presentations!
These tools and methods are still around, but I bet your last presentation didn’t use them. Unless your last presentation was unusually important and visible, I bet you didn’t get an artist or designer to lay it out for you. You did it yourself. You were empowered to craft your presentation at your own pace, using your own creativity, fixing your own mistakes before anybody else saw them. You weren’t tied to a budget for designers and artists. You didn’t have to wait to get on their schedule or go up the chain to ask for the resources. You just did it. Maybe you worked with a few people toward the end to make sure it all looked good and the message came through clearly. Maybe they collaborated with you to create parts of the presentation. But the whole thing took less time and effort. It ended up with a finished presentation that represented what you needed to get across.
Modern workflows are empowering and collaborative. The most effective tools behind those workflows take the friction out of the equation for getting things done and add collaboration in just the right places. Check out our new eBook on Empowered and Collaborative Behavioral Analytics and see how Interana can empower you.
