Devendra Velegandla's Power Platform Odyssey: From Accenture to Rio Tinto, Embracing Governance, Strategy, and the Art of Enterprise Applications

Mark Smith: 0:31
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Perth in Western Australia, which is part of Australia, as you can imagine, he works at Rio Tinto as a power platform architect. He's passionate about using technology to drive business growth and look forward to bringing his skills and expertise to the team. Today we're going to talk about governance and strategy in the power platform, and you might be thinking well, how much will my guest know about this subject when he's only worked for such a short time for this company? Well, he has also worked for 10 years at Accenture, so he has been a long time working this technology. He's been an MVP for many of those years as well, so he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience. You can find links to his bio, social media, et cetera, in the show notes for this episode. Devendra welcome to the podcast media, etc. In the show notes for this episode Devendra welcome to the podcast.

Mark Smith: 1:39
Thanks, Mark that was a great introduction. Good to be here. Good, it's good to have you here. You're one of these people that has really jumped on my radar in recent months and I am blown away by your wisdom, your depth of knowledge, particularly around architecture and the power platform, and experience at the end of the day, and an experience in the world we live in, where everything is changing and so many people are joining the community all the time. I think you know you bring a lot to the table with that experience and I'm hoping today to capture some of what you've learned over the very many years of working in this space. But before we go there, always love for my guests to kind of introduce the the non-work part of themselves. So what I call food, family and fun, because it's three things that are easy to remember, but tell us what they mean to you.

Devendra Velegandla: 2:34
Yeah, sure, I think I'll start with family Me, my wife and two daughters currently living in Perth. We came here in 2018, beginning of 2018, as part of a program called Global Career Program from Accenture Avanade. I'm quite lucky to be here, accenture Avanade, I'm quite lucky to be here. And then, when it comes to food, we eat a lot of vegetarian and a lot of Indian food and, again, kind of lucky, my wife does most of that and for all four of us and we love it. And then fun, mostly spending time with kids. Sometimes we just go to the park, try to go most of the weekends, but I think individually, I kind of follow the sports. That was one of the things that kept me going, so I always wanted to be part of that, but I think I came into IT. But, yeah, that's the fun aspect.

Mark Smith: 3:38
So when you say sports, is that cricket for you?

Devendra Velegandla: 3:41
Yes, mark, it was always. From when I was a kid, especially in the summer, my dad always used to tell me don't go and play in the hot sun, but we just wait for him to take a nap and we just go out and do that. I think it's being continuous with that, but yeah yeah, it's.

Mark Smith: 4:02
It's funny how you know cricket really came from England, yeah, and of course it really affected, I feel, india, there's a few other countries, west Indies, etc. Which is a big deal right, and then of course, australia, new Zealand, always been. It's a big part of my growing up culture was everything around cricket. And then, but I've noticed, I think I don't know, maybe even the last six years, india seems to you know, they created their own league. It's become the kind of dominating force in the cricket world. Is really, you know, even kind of like pulling england into line, as in it seems that india is now like the leaders in this, this, the sport globally yeah, I.

Devendra Velegandla: 4:43
I think the indian premier league helped in in, because I think a lot of sports needs infrastructure, which means that can only be done when they got money. I think with the leagues I think that helped everyone now, because in the larger countries, like so many people, only 11 can play. But now with these leagues I think it's going pretty good for a lot of families, which is good.

Mark Smith: 5:11
So good, okay, let's move on and talk about, uh, another exciting topic, which is around governance and strategies with the power platform and and one of the, I suppose, the hot topics I have been on at the moment. And you know, I've just freshly come back from seattle where I spent the week with a bunch of people in the product team at microsoft and, and I am I feel like the Power Platform has been sold as a low-code, no-code platform that citizen developers, that everybody. You know you can get your grandmother on and she can build an app, and the problem, although that sounds attractive and you know, we want to get to the place where anybody that would use Excel as a tool would use the Power Platform as a tool, and I think that's an admirable place to get to. But what concerns me is this is that 20 years in the space and before we had the Power Platform, we had Dynamics CRM back in the day, or MSCRM. What I started with and we used to chop the top of that off, so to speak, and we used to build any type of application on that platform. Right, we used to. What Microsoft coined for a while was XRM, any type of relationship management. We've got this very sophisticated metadata, meta-driven, model-driven database architecture which allows us to build solutions that are extremely powerful and extremely scalable.

Mark Smith: 6:37
That message hasn't been told, I feel, for maybe six years, and I feel we need to index back there on that message and really talk about building big enterprise applications on that core platform right, and I feel that there's a couple of personas that we need to focus on. One is the role of the enterprise architect in the decision-making of big apps going on this platform and the second is the role of the pro developer, being that I don't know of too many large-scale applications that are not heavily pro-code involvement in my career, even though, yes, functional consultants, consultants and etc. Can build up data models and relationships and and and and business um process can be implemented with that technology. We always have needed to. Really, if you're going to do an enterprise solution, you need the pro developers, and I feel we've we've lost that story.

Mark Smith: 7:34
We've lost our way of onboarding NET type folks to the power platform and get them excited so that they're choosing that as one of their tool sets, and it can only ever be one of the tool sets, and I know I'm ranting to kind of set the scene, but then we're going to go to you, you know, because today most solutions would never be built in a silo. In other words, there would be the need for Azure, you know, using services out of Azure service buses, pipelines, all manner of things. And then M365 is always going to be front and center, because Teams is such an important element of whatever we do. And then Outlook, of course, is still a key communication platform in most organizations, and so it's really bringing together all this technology. And then, if you've got data sitting in SAP, we're going to want to light that up and make it available. Or maybe an Oracle financial system or something like that.

Mark Smith: 8:24
And it's about bringing these ecosystems together to create amazing solutions that enable an organization and my experience in the town you're in, in Perth, wa, years ago, I built a solution with our team at the time and the company I was working for that manages an entire roading infrastructure of the north of of wa, west australia. Right, and a lot of people don't realize that's 11 times the size of the united kingdom. It's large. Every bridge, road, piece of power pole, whatever, um, and I would consider that enterprise app and it's really built on what we would modernly call the power platform. So, with that kind of foundation in place, I'm keen to understand your thoughts around this and your perceptions. Let's start with you know governance and strategy. How do you kind of take an organization and, putting the let's build every app on this platform, that kind of low-code story aside, how do you have those decisions that give enterprise architects the confidence that this platform is secure and is scalable and is going to protect them from a risk profile perspective?

Devendra Velegandla: 9:34
going to protect them from a risk profile perspective? Yeah, I think you covered, I think, quite a lengthy question. To be honest, I think you touched upon quite a few systems within the platform as an ecosystem. You touched upon Azure, xrm, and then Dynamics 365, and then the Power Platform. I think what I see one of the challenges, I think the mindset, because example me, coming from NET background to SharePoint. So what happens is when you have strong programming skills, when you look at a platform in my case it was all SharePoint, then moved to a little bit of Dynamics Most of the times I try to look at okay, for every problem I need to write a code, right?

Devendra Velegandla: 10:25
I think one of the main thing with the traditional software development is the risk is so huge when you try to think of writing code for every component because each and every platform is so big, so you got to look at the out-of-box solutions. Now, once people understand the platform a bit more, then it becomes much more easier when I should code, when I shouldn't code, because the reason is the power platform will not work in isolation. It either need to work with the other platforms in the ecosystem. That could be SharePoint, dynamics, people who are coming in outside. One of their main challenges they don't understand the systems that they're working with and jump onto solutions and now that leads to a lot of pro-development projects not get the results they want, especially from the people side. Let's say, if a client is investing so much, they want to see better results. And again, let's say Power Platform is new at the time, in 2018. That's where I started. It might be even before. If people can show the customers like, okay, these are the things that it could integrate and how it is successful, then the enterprise architects will get the confidence right. But then, out of which, maybe 10, 15 solutions, even one solution is not going as per expectations can always throw some seeds in the mind like, okay, this may not be the platform for the enterprise level, but depends on and again, what I believe is, everyone's experience is very limited, because you got vast variety of challenges that people are solving nowadays with Power Platform and Power Platform does both the people in the business and also people who got skills at the pro dev level. I think it's just differentiating when to do. What is going to be the key. What is going to be the key? That's where in my current role. That's where we are seeing like.

Devendra Velegandla: 12:36
If there is a requirement, we need to help them people to choose what solution they need to start with, sometimes even like having a checklist on what data sources this particular application need to use. Does it need to connect to just SharePoint or Dynamics, or even does it need M365? I think having that guidance to people is going to help them eliminate the challenges a bit later. But again, it's a fascinating discussion, mark, because there is a lot of marketing that happened. Like I said, everyone can build solutions, which is great, but can they build applications that integrate with SAP, integrate with a lot of M365 services and Azure services?

Devendra Velegandla: 13:24
I don't think so. I can give you a few examples where, if I'm in a business and I am using paper-based applications, I can only move to the Excel or maybe a little bit SharePoint list, because that's similar to Excel, but I don't have that understanding about moving to different tech. It's gonna take some time and getting the enterprise architects buy-in is going to be much more challenging because you need to show them the results examples. The more we show them the results and also the value generation is going to be the key as well, and on this one. The extension would be everyone can build solutions, but most of the times, let's say, in the organization, you've got 1,000 people right, 1,000 people, out of which 20% 30% of them might be building solutions and out of 20%, which is 200 people, and 1% of them is going to be really making quality apps that could generate a lot of value. I think everyone in the company needs to help those 1% to 5% of people.

Mark Smith: 14:43
How do you? You know, one of the things you and I have discussed over the past weeks is, I see, one of the roadblockers, if you like to going into really enterprise scale, is the fear of premium license. Right, the concern that you know. With M365 and whether it's E3 or E5, you get a seeded license and that's how a lot of people have come to the power platform. But then there's this fear that, oh to go premium, that's going to cost us a lot of money, but there's no thought of technical debt. There's no thought of what the security profile is between a SharePoint list as opposed to Dataverse. There's no thought around what you get with managed environments, for example, around the rigor in software development that it provides, with things like ALM that's not factored in and so they just see this number as opposed to free and like why?

Mark Smith: 15:42
How do you have those discussions with your stakeholders to take them on that journey? And I know I shared with you the total economic impact report that came out from Forrester and there was some interesting, you know. I find that when people really read that, they understand oh my gosh, I've been looking at this all the wrong way and there's another way. How do you have those discussions internally around going to a premium model and therefore all the benefits of Dataverse that comes with it premium connectors, of course, and managed environments in that picture.

Devendra Velegandla: 17:03
Yeah, great question, mark. I think there was always a before and after story. Thank you for sharing me that economic impact report, because when I was working with a lot of other customers, it's always a discussion. Right, because I have worked where every request that needs data has been scrutinized because they don't have the licenses Right. But now now, after reading this report and looking at some of the some of the benefits that people can get, I think it's people have to look at like a time horizon. It's not going to be six months or one year benefit, it should be like three years, five years. What is the investment that we could make and get the results? And it's only going to compound over a period of time. That was my light bulb moment when I read that economic impact report, because license is going to cost at the beginning but then it's going to provide a lot more opportunities, provided you use the tech properly.

Devendra Velegandla: 18:08
That's where I think proper guidelines on when to build solutions. Let's say, from SharePoint background I have seen good and not so good. You can build all sorts of solutions. But let's say you try to build large scale solutions with a lot of data, transactional data, and it's going to hit not now. Six months, 12 months. Everything looks great, but you go in 24 months, 48 months, 60 months. In five years time it will have its own challenges and you will be doing the remediation to fix those. It would cost more, but most of the times people is like, okay, can you just build this now and get it going? We'll figure it out how it's going to do in five years time.

Devendra Velegandla: 18:54
That's one thing I think needs education from everywhere. People need to promote what's the longer term impact. It needs to be like 10 years term impact. It need not to be like 10 years, maybe even three years and promote the value versus the cost that is being going to spend. And also, I believe I can share my experience with Dataverse. When I started from SharePoint to Dataverse, I had a lot of challenge and I see that when I answer in the forums these days a lot of people it's not easy to understand Dataverse security. I know Dataverse provides heaps of what do you call features in terms of the security, but I always recommend the Powercat video that was done by Demos with like 30 minute video. Every now and then people go and watch. I think we need to have more of that content and also how it could be simplified to teach people. I think once people understand the power of the dataverse and what it can do for enterprise level applications, I think a lot of people will also use that.

Mark Smith: 20:06
Part of your role. My understanding is you're involved in empowering and equipping the maker community that come along and tell me what does that look like for you in an enterprise organization? How do you corral those people that are kind of going to opt in and get involved? And then how do you take them on a journey of taking them from wherever they are in their experience level to a point where they can become, you know, really pretty good at what they're doing and what they're building solution wise sure, mark, uh, I think in in power platform.

Devendra Velegandla: 20:42
Um, we are lucky. I think Manuel and team did a wonderful job creating starter kit that can actually give us insights who is doing what, where they're actually doing, what they're actually doing right. So we already got those insights. Now every person is busy with what they wanted to achieve. It's one thing that we need to understand. But from Power Platform, we always wanted to like how we could do better in the Power Platform. But from the people point of view, they don't get come to office and get excited like I need to build a solution, but mostly I think they just come and do their day to day work. They want to go doing that pretty easily.

Devendra Velegandla: 21:25
Now, as a Power Platform team, you need to identify those challenges and basically help them to get through those challenges. That's where you build the trust. If you go and ask them okay, you're the top 10 guys building a lot of solutions, come and join this committee. And we wanted to do the forums. I don't think that works because everyone is busy. I think the starting point would be identifying the challenges those people got and provide them the help, because that's how it happened in many times where people used to come to us and we don't tell them like, okay, let's start a committee or community, we will try to help them. One of them is a lot of people doesn't have proper guidelines. There is a lot of content outside Microsoft done it. A lot of MVPs put together the guidelines, but a lot of those guidelines may not be 100% fit for the people who are doing the solutions, because every organization have their own policies, controls, systems. Now, as a Power Platform team, we need to give them what exactly they need. So what we did is we went ahead and created the guidelines that are needed for them to take to the next level or solve those challenges. And they said whenever they wanted to request enrollment, it's taking time. So then what we did? We went ahead and automated that process. Now, earlier it used to take over a week or a few days time, but now it just happens in less than an hour or so. So I think the first step would be identify those problems, ask them what are the challenges and then solve those challenges and then tell them we wanted to do this on a monthly basis or whatever the cadence, and then bring them together, start small and again listen to their challenges.

Devendra Velegandla: 23:25
It's not what. A lot of times, what happens is okay, we are Power Platform team, we are doing a lot of good things you need to follow. No, it should be other way around. What are your challenges? What are you working on? Is it something you built recently Can you showcase to other people? Maybe they might be interested in? And a lot of people wanted to have that recognition and show the work they have done. So if we can do that, I think that adds a lot more value and you don't have to grow that so rapidly because again, go back to that 1%, 2% and 5% people where you need to help. That's where a lot of quality solutions are being built and a lot of small apps may not need a lot of value. Some of them eventually will also die. So that's how I think streamlining those processes, listening to their challenges and making their day-to-day job easier is going to drive the growth.

Mark Smith: 24:28
I believe, when you think of an organization like the size that you work for, where do you see the power platform team? Where do they sit? Do they sit as in? Do you and I'm really asking your opinion here do you think it should be squarely the ownership of it, because it's a bit of, you know, infrastructure technology that enables this, or should it sit outside? It should be. It should, yes, and obviously we'll always need a connection into it because they govern things like licenses, security protocols, dlp, etc. There's a whole range of things that it can be provided.

Mark Smith: 25:01
But my observation is it's it don't want to support a ton of little apps. They don't. They don't have it. It's not their service desk, they don't want to. You know, when a maker goes, oh, how do I do this, it don't want to support that. Right, it's not even in production. Yet we're not a, you know, never necessarily running a devops type, you know. So you don't have that support In your mind in a large enterprise. Where should it sit? Where should this part sit inside the organization? It's an interesting question.

Devendra Velegandla: 25:35
I think it can be part of IT because that's where I think you work pretty closely with the other teams, like security and software asset management team. So you will be part of the IT team, but that's where you get more opportunities to interact and understand the other team's challenges also. Right, they won't simply come and say don't use this, simply come and say don't use this. If you could have a process in place and tell them, for example, when you look at the strategies and enabling custom connectors, if you make it easy for other teams, they are there to help you. Right? That's one part of it from the Power Platform team. It sits in between other teams and the people in the business. Now the other question you asked, like how I'm going to support, or the IT is going to support, the little app. It's always the support is going to be the challenging, right? That's where, as a Power Platform team, you need to always look at what are the solutions that are actually being used by a lot of people, though it's a little app? And is it being used by a lot of people Though it's a little app, and is it being used by a lot of people in the business or a lot of people in the department, or is it? The business impact is going to be high. Is the data that is being used highly confidential? And those are the different factors you need to look at and you need to ask the business. But again, the support is going to cost at and you need to ask the business, but again, the support is going to cost at the end of the day, right? So there is a balance between the cost and also the value that is going to generate the app.

Devendra Velegandla: 27:19
If the app is going to be used by only that person or less than a few people, if it is not like a lot of impact to the business, maybe support is not needed. But then if people come to us and say this is being used by a thousand people on day in, day out, we are getting a lot of requests for enhancements. That is something I think the Power Platform team need to put in a process and then help them support those apps. Again, it varies from organization to organization what kind of support you want to provide. You will just give enhancements also to the other team to do it, or you still make that citizen dev responsible for this one. That's where I think I haven't thought through entirely, but it's always a challenge. I still feel it's the value versus the cost that needed to support those apps.

Devendra Velegandla: 28:20
But from the Power Platform team, we need to keep an eye on what are the most used apps. That's where, in the previous discussion, I was mentioning about the automation. You need to give them or ask the information of those data confidentiality, business impact and all the other information at the beginning of the journey when they develop the solutions. And then you keep doing proactive monitoring or maybe even reactive, like you see that one of the app being used by so many people, then you go and talk to that person as well, not the other way, uh, one way, like citizen devs or people in the business will talk to you, but power platform team can go and talk to them as well. Like, okay, this app is becoming critical, can we help?

Mark Smith: 29:08
Yeah, now you brought up an interesting thing there, which is the Power Platform team going out to the business and having a chat. And how do you do that proactively? What have you found works? Well, to make sure that really two things happen. One, the business stakeholders are aware of the art of the possible. You know what are they frustrated with every day that you could potentially help with.

Mark Smith: 29:36
And in a way, I'm talking because I know a little bit about the industry that you're operating in. You know it's out on that mine site where there's a port-a-com unit and there's people grabbing lab samples and it's being tracked on whiteboards or, you know, documented in excel spreadsheet. Um, you know miles maybe from the closest city or town or anything like that. In those scenarios where you can present an idea that potentially would make their life so much easier, like a mobile device that allows for capturing the data directly from the lab samples in the field, how they're stored, the longevity of the storage of those samples, all and on my sites, lab samples aren't small samples, they are massive drumloads of sample material and things like this. Loads of sample material and things like this.

Mark Smith: 30:28
You know how do you have that conversation in the Power Platform team out to the business, make them aware of the art of the possible and what you could possibly create in such a frequent way that the business is starting to think you know what. Perhaps the Power Platform team can solve this for me. Perhaps there's a way that you know, I don't have to grab yet another Excel spreadsheet, which I'm not sure if I'm on the latest version, and and who updated this new macro in here and what does it do that? I don't know that it did before and I don't understand. Like how, how did does your team maintain that constant comm with the business to keep the constant, you know, if you like, backlog full of projects that really empower an organization to be able to do the jobs that they do each day better?

Devendra Velegandla: 31:16
I think one of the opportunity that we got is we have a lot of other people deliver solutions or do kind of influencing the people to use IT. We go and show them simple examples on how Power Platform can use, Because people see the examples and think can this be used within our department? So we have to show them a lot more real-world examples on how other people are actually doing it. And also, I think if we got scenarios where some of the real-world applications were and again they might have a lot of use cases, right, what are the things that they would be doing? That is taking more time for them and again we might need to start small. One of the things that we do internally is having a SharePoint site that promotes Power Platform. So we started something like Perfect Math Series and what it basically does is how Power Platform can integrate with Office 365 services. Like there would be scenarios where they might be getting a lot of emails now how I could streamline it. So now if they see an example where how Power Platform can talk to Outlook, Same with Power Platform, how it can integrate with Microsoft Teams.

Devendra Velegandla: 32:54
So I think, instead of going with the big use cases and tell them like Power Platform can deliver. I think initially the trust needs to be developed and show them the simple automations and how it could improve the task that they're doing and then promote the bigger picture like how it could do the or solve, rather, the bigger problems that they got in the business, Because a lot of times if you start with the bigger ones, there might be a risk as well. If Power Platform is not the right tool for everything, then it might be like losing the trust, if that is the right word, but then again it takes back them to where they are. I think, helping them, show them simple solutions and then see how they can solve those problems and then take it to the next level and then some challenges like they won't be able to do it. However, you educate. That's where I think your beginning question about using pro developers and introduce them to solve the problems is going to be an important one.

Mark Smith: 34:10
Devendra, it's been fantastic having you on the show. Our time is up, we're over time and I just so enjoy talking to you and learning from you. Where can people you know see what you're up to? You know what's your handle in those forums about. You know, with what you're doing, what are you doing? You know around community engagement these days out in the, not in the the Rio community, but actually out broader in the, in the global community for the power platform and dynamics 365.

Devendra Velegandla: 34:41
First of all, thank you for the opportunity. It's lovely having this conversation. People can find me on LinkedIn with my name. I am going to blog pretty soon I have a pen running but it's not started yet. But mostly I'm answering questions on administration, governance forum, on Power Apps. That's one area I wanted to contribute and see if I can make a small impact, and also I'm also learning from some of the questions that people are asking. One of the things that you touched on managed environments previously, how they could better be useful. What are the risks. So I'm learning as well as while I'm contributing. So, yeah, it's great going so far.

Mark Smith: 35:27
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.