Strategies for Business Agility with Andrew Welch

Mark Smith: 0:30
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. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the Ecosystems Podcast. Today you're joined with a cast of two, unfortunately, will Dorrington what did he do?

Andrew Welch: 0:58
Why is he in? I mean, should we say Scotland again? Is he in Scotland? Is he somewhere in Scotland, right, right, I assume that's where Will Darrington goes.

Mark Smith: 1:08
That's where he goes. That's where he goes. And then Anna, what's happened there?

Andrew Welch: 1:14
Anna is legitimately, legitimately sick tonight, so she has a note.

Mark Smith: 1:19
She's worn out.

Andrew Welch: 1:21
She, she's. I mean that's a note. That's what happens when you work with Will. I mean, I think that I think she's just run into the ground.

Mark Smith: 1:32
Yeah, okay, and then what's Mr Huntingford's excuse?

Andrew Welch: 1:36
oh god only knows. I think it was something like I'm just slammed right because that is an odd occurrence, a quite unique occurrence, that chris huntingford would be busy I heard it was actually that he wanted to get another tattoo and that takes priority for him really, I can only assume he's going to get the tattoo of like the ecosystems cast banner tattooed.

Mark Smith: 2:03
Well, we'll just see where he gets it I heard it was um he wants to get the co-pilot logo in full color and blazoned on the the original co-pilot.

Andrew Welch: 2:15
Before it gets changed, before it goes out of style yeah, he wants it.

Mark Smith: 2:19
The with the little yellow pre underneath it, pre, which, I think, assume stands for pre-release. That's what it says on the bottom of mine, or is it? Or is it? No, it is pre.

Andrew Welch: 2:29
I was going to say, is it pro, but it is pre do you think that his his co-pilot logo tattoo is going to be anywhere near his data flex pro tattoo?

Mark Smith: 2:40
mate it's if you get that, you've been around for a while I tell you what it's going to be near, is going to be near his uh fabric tattoo he doesn't have a fabric tattoo does, does he? Have you not seen it?

Andrew Welch: 2:55
No, I haven't. That's amazing.

Mark Smith: 2:58
He is ahead of the curve, Chris.

Andrew Welch: 3:04
I don't go investigating Chris's tattoos or his parts, and I'm sure it's come out on one of the many WhatsApp groups that I have muted, so you lose some.

Mark Smith: 3:12
Tell us, dear guest, dear audience, how do you like the 30 minute format? Are you more comfortable with that than our hour and a half type episodes that we're doing in the past? We'd love to hear your feedback, your thoughts on that. I'm modeling today. You like that 90 day mentoring challenge?

Andrew Welch: 3:31
it's the right way around.

Mark Smith: 3:33
It's reversed for me Power Platform, dynamics 360. Okay, it's good. It's good we can see it. Conference season is coming up, so I thought I'd better put a brand on.

Andrew Welch: 3:45
So which conferences are you ready for?

Mark Smith: 3:49
Well, we've got MVP Summit right, which is next month, a couple of weeks.

Andrew Welch: 3:54
I have to book for that still could go.

Mark Smith: 3:56
Oh man, well, well, I've booked twice, I've paid for flights twice to mvp. I'm not. I am straight up what so why? Well, last year, when they first announced the date, right, I was like I booked it straight away, the flights. And the reason for this is the year before they announced it so late that the tickets to fly from New Zealand to Seattle were like in the ballpark of $7,000 return, right, and it's just.

Mark Smith: 4:23
That's ridiculous when it's coming out of your own pocket. You know it's funny the bigger the organization you work for, the less they want to cover any expenses that they don't consider. Well, you know, the rule of thumb in the company I work for is that what is the client that you're visiting, right, and what's the opportunity in the CRM that it's tagged to, you know? And so that kind of didn't fit that. So I was like I'm doing it on my own bat. You know, I'll pay for myself to go to MVP Summit. And then last week, while I was on leave, I came back and, um, I saw an approval for all costs to be met by the big blue brand, and so I went about canceling my personal flights cost me 150 fee, but then booking it all through, yeah, yeah, yeah it just means that I jump on the corporate insurance.

Mark Smith: 5:21
That way I don't cancel the private insurance cover and whatnot, and of course I get the per diems and all that other kind of stuff that goes with it and other kind of stuff that goes with it.

Andrew Welch: 5:36
My bold statement on this is that if you're an MVP and you work for an organization, especially a partner like I, get it in customer land, but if you're an MVP working for a partner and they will not pay for you to travel, for your travel to MVP summit, one of two things are the case. Either you need to find a new place to work with people who are going to invest in your learning and your knowledge or two.

Andrew Welch: 5:58
Apparently you're not actually that good at your job and they don't think you're worth it, so maybe time for some either introspection or some inspection of your working situation.

Mark Smith: 6:14
Hard talk from. I take that line as well, but it was interesting. I was talking to a guy, a consultant, and I think he was in the Netherlands just recently working for a partner and the partner had grown over his tenure there. So when he was first there he got to go to conferences and we're not talking about MVP, we're talking about conferences in general right in our community, that type of thing. The company he was working for loosely I think he said maybe 700 staff when, when he joined and he had these benefits in europe etc.

Mark Smith: 6:47
Now the staff is 4 000 odd and he doesn't get to go to anything because that's not, you know, it's kind of like this is the policy and you're just one of the millions and, yeah, I'm of the same opinion Time to find a new employer, right. But the thing is is that, as I say, the bigger the company, the harder it is, because the policies that they have are just so kind of. You know, when you're working for a company that has over 350,000 employees, they create these policies that are kind of like it's like there's no manager discretion, even there's just bang. That's the rule. Non-compliant, compliant, do not pass go. It's crazy.

Andrew Welch: 7:28
So I have a few thoughts on that, but I will say I'm putting my money where my mouth is. I will say I'm putting my money where my mouth is and I so another bold statement, and that is that 100% of all full-time employees at cloud lighthouse are getting their MVP summit travel paid for. So that is that is. That's the case.

Mark Smith: 7:49
Those 150 MVPs that are going to be on your crew as you scale Right, exactly Forever, in perpetuity Is that the correct term? That are going to be on your crew as you scale, Right exactly. Forever in perpetuity Is that the correct term, perpetuity? Yes, there you go. You heard it there. Take this to court if you're ever working for Andrew in the future Right right.

Mark Smith: 8:09
Well done, sir. One of the questions that I have been that's top of mind for me. In the last week, I've been involved in conversations with field staff in Microsoft across the SEMA region and one of the topics keep coming up is how do you have AI conversations with CTOs, CIOs and CDOs, chief digital officers, right? So, chief information officer, chief technology officer and chief digital officer, and I'm interested to you know you've written the white paper recently, which is a brilliant white paper, Even more so, of course, if Snoop Dogg reads it to you. But that aside, Did we?

Andrew Welch: 9:03
talk about that. We did, we did, we did Okay. So this is yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 9:08
So, and if anyone's wondering how that comes about, I have an app that I pay for called speechify, text to speech, and so I can take any document, pdf, etc. And it uses ai to speed up. It actually keeps incrementally, just subtly in the background, going faster and faster and faster you can go. Okay, my comprehension just stopped because you're now at 5x the, the normal reading speed, as an example. So it's pretty cool. But you can choose actors, accents, etc. You know they've obviously all been paid. You know to have their lexicon of their voice or whatever put in there and and.

Andrew Welch: 9:46
But it's crazy, you know, when you have business papers read to you by snoop dogg I suddenly like I'm wondering if it would be awesome or just unbearable to listen to this white paper be read to you by C-3PO.

Mark Smith: 10:01
What do you think? I don't even know. You can go either way on this. Yeah, yeah, I've got a feeling that C-3PO is not in there because Disney would have had to. You know what's the voice actor that you know? Probably the licensing applications are probably Of course, of course.

Andrew Welch: 10:19
So anyway, back to your, back to your CIOs.

Mark Smith: 10:22
Yeah, back to back to the question. Right Is that? And it goes to a further question that that I'm really pondering myself quite a bit and that the world is changing at a phenomenal rate in this era of AI and I feel that some people are going already. I'm late to the game. I don't know where to start. There's so much content being every man and his dog is throwing out content there, and I say this also about things like Microsoft Learn. Microsoft Learn is like a mega university now. There's stuff on everything, every product, every. There's probably 10 things on everything. Right, there's multiple versions of everything on everything.

Andrew Welch: 11:07
Do they even agree? Open question.

Mark Smith: 11:10
Well, this is the thing, right. When software changes at the speed that it changes nowadays, what was right two weeks ago could be wrong today. And this is the constant thing. You know, I suppose, and you know, as I say, when I started my IT career, products were released once every three years. You didn't have this massive need to continue to be current as we do today. You know, we've had the wave one release already in the, in the, the power and the dynamics, 365 ecosystems, and there's going to be another one. And there's, you know, if it's anything like past, there's that's about 800 different changes per year that are, you know, being rolled out, and so that's a lot to take in and keep across when you're, you know, consulting at the top end of the game. And so my question, I suppose, is this I think what people are seeking is a learning path, which is okay. So there's a thousand courses out there, but you only need to do this module from that one, that module from that one, that module from that and have a curated path, because I feel that the first lot of stuff that dropped early last year around AI was still a lot around.

Mark Smith: 12:31
How did we get here? You knows, there was, you know, the Turing, and, and there's all these type of steps up to where we are, and that's all great theory, and if I need to do an exam on the history of AI, awesome. But I need to understand, like there's, yes, you can do the kind of what's a business perspective of an LLM, but the next step is that what should I be thinking about of any of those C levels that I just mentioned before? What do I need to be thinking about inside my organization and my op and and my advice to the organization I work for, about what should we be doing to and and? And? I'm going to refer back to your paper, not just because you know, um, I think it was awesome and I'm trying to give you airtime for it. That's not.

Mark Smith: 13:28
The point is that you know you talked about this concept of being prepared for the unknown. You do not know what changes are going to come in your industry in the next three, six, nine months, but could you set up and and it's something my wife and I, meg, have been talking a lot about is a mindset, a mindset that prepares you, so that you have this kind of idea of whatever comes, you have a model of adjusting to it, learning to it, applying it and therefore, when we look at ecosystems of an organization and you know if I think of the power platform what the platform gives you is when that use case comes out of your organization in three months time, you've got a way of addressing it without going out to the market and going okay, it's still a market scan of what software can do this. You've got a platform. You've got the ability to mold your organization's journey as you need to, because the infrastructure is done. You don't have to think about APIs and all that kind of stuff at a very low level, because you've made those decisions already. You're now ready to go. We have the data. Let's add the business value by orchestrating this in the right way for staff, customers, et cetera.

Mark Smith: 14:45
I've talked a bit, andrew. The floor is yours. Answer me.

Andrew Welch: 14:49
Yeah, so how many episodes do we have to devote to this topic?

Mark Smith: 14:54
yeah, like how much. Like we've only got 15 minutes left, so yeah, what's that?

Andrew Welch: 14:58
what's our timer say?

Mark Smith: 14:59
there's your question.

Andrew Welch: 15:00
You got 15 minutes to answer so obviously there's there's a lot, a lot there and I think my my opinion may have changed several times as you asked the question you kind of talked through. But interesting that you are running into this because I had a, I had a message last night from one of my, one of the organizations I work with, where they want to do a leadership upskilling initiative and they were asking me about they're asking me about the white paper and they're asking me about some of the other sessions that I do and you're really trying to do exactly as you say prepare their, their in the industry recently, who he himself is struggling because more of the work he's doing is architectural and it's strategy oriented and it's less hands on keyboard building something to get you get to a point where you have a really hard decision to make, right, if you love building apps or if you love building whatever it is that you've been building. You have to decide am I going to continue doing this, this thing, or am I going to discover a love for these other things Now that you've reached a point like where your level of experience and the knowledge that you've accumulated on starts to unlock, unlock doors? But if you go down that second path. You have to let some other things go, like you're not going to have hands on keyboard as frequently, if at all, and some of those skills that you once had. You're going to understand the principles, right, you're going to be grounded in that experience that you have, but you're going to let some other things, like your hands-on with the latest and greatest technology. You're going to let that go to some extent, and that's an emotional thing for people. Of course, by the time you're a CIO or a CTO or a VP or whatever, you probably have long ago made that decision, or you probably haven't been terribly effective in your job because you're so in the weeds, but I think that it's illustrative of how fundamentals are important.

Andrew Welch: 17:23
So I actually when, if we go back to late 2022, when the Microsoft investment in OpenAI was announced and ChatGPT became available, and I personally went through a bit of a phase of terror, right, I'm wondering am I done? Do I have the knowledge to make it and to thrive here? Have the knowledge to make it and to thrive here? And what I found is that a combination of patience, sort of letting the technology and letting the market gestate a little bit and seeing, observing, seeing where things were going to fall and not feeling a need to open my mouth immediately. A combination of that, along with sort of an understanding of the fundamentals around data and we're talking at an enterprise scale around how you know data platform, the data platform works in an enterprise, and how you're going back to how applications are modernized. You know these. These principles, really excuse me I think helped me in due time to overcome that anxiety that I had about am I going to be able to hack it in this era? So, first and foremost, don't feel a need to open your mouth immediately. When you see something new, let it sink in. This is all new for everyone. Let it, let it sink in.

Mark Smith: 18:51
This is all new for everyone.

Andrew Welch: 18:52
Secondly, immerse yourself in some of the principles of how, how the data platform works, right. How AI acts on that organizational data not how do you train the LLM, the large language model on the whole of the internet right, but how does data actually get your organizational data that you own? How does that feed an AI workload? Do some reading on retrieval, augmented generation, rag, right? Those are the sorts of principles that I think are very useful for grounding you as the leader, or as the aspiring leader or, as you know, a senior architect or whoever. I don't want to make this just about the CTO or the CIO, so I think that's really important, and I have some other ideas, but I'll stop and pass it back to you on this.

Mark Smith: 19:45
That's brilliant. So just one thing you didn't answer. Yeah, you said do some reading on RAG where, yes, what, what, as in you know, and, and, and. This is the thing is that?

Mark Smith: 20:00
I suppose, yeah, yeah, bring me the things right yeah, the thing is is that I find that, um, as I say in, in a world where there is so much information, it's hard distilling down to what's the information that I need. Yes, and, and I mean it's personal to each person, right, it's hard distilling down to what's the information that I need. Yes, and, and I mean it's personal to each person, right, it's that's, it's, it's not. Like you know, I use chachi bd, um four and, by the way, I said four on purpose, because I keep running into people that are still on 3.5 and wonder why they're getting shit results right and I still, you know articulating and getting better at prompting, but you know the amount of times over the last year I've said to, to, to it. What learning path would you recommend for me? And it just it doesn't. It doesn't give me something substantial and, for whatever reason, it doesn't give me like, I don't want to read a deep technical paper on llms. I don't need to go that deep. That's not the conversations that I'm having. Even vector databases and stuff. Yeah, I kind of want to know the concept, but I don't need to get down into the details because I'm never going to need to be down in those type of details and stuff. It's around having that ability and and you know, my whole career has been built around being able to have business conversations that are grounded in technology yeah right, that are not and also conveyed in a way that makes nobody feel like they're numb numb, you know, listening like I don't want them to feel like, oh, you know, like.

Mark Smith: 21:36
So I try to totally remove acronyms from anything I say, because growing up in the Microsoft world it is just full of acronyms and I am surprised I had it. This week I had an acronym for a particular role in Microsoft that I was interviewing the individual, and when I say interviewing, I was doing what is called research-based interviewing, you know, which is a design thinking process. I wasn't interviewing them for a job role, I was interviewing them about their experiences in something and what I understood as their three-letter acronym meant was totally different. One word I had wrong and that one word made a quantum leap of difference at understanding and um, about what they did, and I was just blown away and that I could have stuck with the opening being the three-letter acronym. But I chose to write it out and got this massive clarification from it and I know I've once again digressed, but I mean just saying that you need to be able to give um business, sound business advice in a way that is not technical but it is grounded in the technology you know.

Mark Smith: 22:47
And so, yeah, how do you and I go back to you know what you know? As, as it books, is it specific courses? I think there's this gap around business knowledge in the context of ai that the world needs at the moment. That is uh, and I'm not talking about like a university degree kind of level. I'm talking about if I had one hour a day through the business week that I could be improving my ai skills. What should I be spending that ai on in the context of business? So I'm not talking about private life et cetera, but in the context of business. What are your thoughts?

Andrew Welch: 23:25
Yeah Well, first of all, I do want to just briefly interrupt this to say that, even though there are only two faces on the podcast today, we have been indirectly joined by one of our missing co-hosts because Anna just brought me a glass of wine it is recording recording time in. In the UK is eight o'clock in the evening for us, so it is a fair call. Cheers Mark.

Mark Smith: 23:53
Cheers, cheers. I'll cheers you to my water, because it's early morning for me.

Andrew Welch: 24:00
I won't belabor this because I don't want this to be what the podcast is about, but, very truly, part of what you're getting at right is why I wrote the white paper. So, without saying, I'm going to say if you're in this situation, go read that white paper, because I spent many, many hours over a period of months curating a lot of this for you. So go have a look. But I can point you to some specific, to some specific sources of information that I've enjoyed and like, down to the article and that I found really useful, and then some that I've recently sort of been turned on to, though I haven't spent enough time with them to be able to tell you if I think it's good or bad. There's an absolutely brilliant guy working on one of the AI product teams at Microsoft I believe in the cognitive search team formerly Cognitive search, now Azure AI search a fellow named Pablo Castro, and he has a piece and I linked to it in the white paper from March 2023. So it's been some time since I read it. I can't quote to you exactly how current it is, but it was revolutionize your enterprise data with chat, gpt, next gen apps with Azure, open AI and cognitive search, and that was on the Azure AI services blog and I remember when I read that I I that was that was an illuminating piece and I thought he he did a great job. So, um, and I thought it spoke to kind of what a little bit about what we're getting. I mean, it was, it was probably more more technical, right, but it was a piece, a technical piece, that spoke to me while I was actually in a role as the CTO of a global company. There's that I also, and this one is is is a weird one. Maybe if you're really immersed in tech, maybe if you're really immersed in tech.

Andrew Welch: 26:01
But I tell people all the time go subscribe to the Economist. If the whole of what the Economist is covering is not your cup of tea, you're not particularly interested in what's happening socially, politically, in various parts of the world. That's just not your interest. That's just fine. I find that the Economist has done a really good job over the last year covering AI and covering what's happening right now in the techno business world just the right level.

Andrew Welch: 26:36
A few pieces that stick out to me there was a recent piece that came out too late to make it into the white paper, but it basically looked at and this is, I think, illustrative of the kind of coverage you're going to get from the Economist is it looked at the kind of trends over the last five, 10 years in capital expense or, as they say, in economic capex? So that's an investment that an organization makes in acquiring or building a thing, and it'll tend to be a one-time investment versus in operational expense or opex, which is an ongoing thing. So to put this into IT terms, right, it's sort of the difference of are we going to implement a piece of software as a part of a project or are we going to have managed services that you know, or O&M that will support this long term? And what the piece did and I really liked it is it identified that actually right now we're still seeing across the global economy? Oh, you got a thumbs up from me because think most of us, and particularly economists who are following the AI revolution, would have expected and probably certainly down from where it needs to be in order to really scale AI across many as the very nature of IT, as the cloud, has changed the very nature of investment patterns in IT.

Andrew Welch: 28:26
What we may also be seeing is that some of this investment that would have previously been classed as CapEx, has now migrated to OpEx, and I think, if you want an example outside of AI, look at low code. Right, it used to be where we would go. We'd say I'm going to implement Dynamics and there's gonna be a big, expensive project for that right. But what we now see is that we see smaller teams that cost less to support but are more of an ongoing thing. Like we say, we're going to be growing this platform over time, not we're going to do this all in a really expensive big bang that we class as CapEx. So the reason I bring this up is that that's the type of thinking that you're going to get from the economist. It's not super technical, but it does do a nice job of blending the technology with the business.

Mark Smith: 29:17
I like it Well, andrew, it's been good talking to you today. We're on time. We will see you on the next one. Give us feedback. Let us know, as you're listening to this, what you would like us to talk more about, talk less about whichever you prefer, but we would love your feedback. Ciao for now. Thanks everyone. 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.