Power Platform's Enterprise-Level Capabilities - New Zealand Passports and Visas

Mark Smith: 0:32
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. In this episode, we'll be focusing on large power platform implementations that are mission critical by application. Now, being that Dynamics 365 is built on the power platform, we would include Dynamics 365 applications as part of our discussion today. Today's guest is from Wellington, new Zealand. He works at DXC Technologies as a solution architect. He is the author of a Microsoft Dynamics 365 extensions cookbook. After being frustrated with frequently reviewing poor quality CRM implementations, he decided to write about best practice and promote quality CRM implementations. You can find links to his bio, show notes etc. In the show notes for this episode. Rami, welcome to the show.

Rami Mounla: 1:35
Thank you, Mark. It's a pleasure to be on your show.

Mark Smith: 1:38
Mate it the show notes for this episode. Rami, welcome to the show. Thank you, mark. It's a pleasure to be on your show. Mate. It's good to have you on. I know you were on some years ago. We had a discussion, but at the moment I've started really drilling into and highlighting large implementations using the Power Platform and hence how discussion started. I was in Vancouver at an event that you and I were both presenting at and I heard your story and I was like we need to get this to a wider audience because I think it's impactful and it shows the scale of what can be done on the Power Platform. Before we get there, tell us a bit about your you know food, family and fun. What's it like living in wellington, new zealand and uh and your journey to kind of like, give a bit of the overview of your experience on the power platform to date. Rather than your you know, I was born at a specific time of taking us. From that point forward, let's just talk about your Dynamics Power Platform experience.

Rami Mounla: 2:34
Yeah, absolutely so. You and I, mark, have similarities in our lives, especially around you know we're family guys. You have a lifestyle blog, I have a lifestyle blog. I look at some of your posts and I can relate a lot to the things that you do, the problems that you have on a day-to-day life, but also the problems that you have in the Dynam-to-day life, but also the problems that you have in the dynamics community and the market and the industry specifically.

Rami Mounla: 3:01
So I do remember more than 10 years ago when we used to have those TechEd sessions in Oakland. We used to present at those big conferences and the message hasn't changed much in terms of we mainly focus on quality implementations in this market and ensuring that Dynamics and the Power Platform have a strong holding in there and a good reputation, because you and I and everybody listening to that podcast knows very well that this platform is capable, this platform can scale and this platform can deliver to a large audience and to people that use mega apps, as we were calling them. So, as you mentioned, I'm Wellington-based and public sector right. So my customers or the end users that will be using the product are potentially the entire population of New Zealand and even people beyond that that are interested in coming to New Zealand, so we'll talk a little bit about that as well.

Mark Smith: 4:06
Excellent. So I just want to clarify one thing. We think that the audience listening are familiar with the Power Platform as an enterprise development tool. The problem I have and I've raised this with Microsoft is that since about 2016 onwards, when we started getting Power Apps, power Automate and things like this, the notion of citizen developer and anybody can build something on this platform has become the catch cry of the platform, and the fact that you can build big enterprise solutions has not been talked about.

Mark Smith: 4:43
And you know, as you said, our careers have always been around. You know, our origin in xrm was taking the mscrm application and building a enterprise application on it, and we've both done it in public sector. We've done it commercially, and so we asked back in the day for a headless platform. We didn't need the CRM piece. Just give us the ability to create our own data models underneath and build anything we wanted, because at the end of the day, we're always stripping off the sales piece to build these kind of solutions. So we got the Power Platform, we got Dataverse separated out, we are enabled to build big enterprise applications, but Microsoft stopped talking about that functionality. So we've got a more powerful platform than we have ever had in our history, but it's sold in market like it's Excel in the cloud.

Mark Smith: 5:36
Anybody can build stuff, and any enterprise architect and I really focus on that persona specifically if they just listen to the marketing and don't get under the hood, they relegate it as here's a tool for children. Yeah, they can use that type of thing. It's not mainstream. We're not going to do enterprise workloads on it. Hence this podcast series that I'm doing, which is to showcase seriously large, modern applications built on this platform, that it is an enterprise play, that it's not just about citizen developers, it's around, about large applications that ultimately end up being mission critical, used by millions, definitely thousands, both internal and external to an organization. And so that brings us to this conversation today and the work you type that you do. My understanding is it's not that citizen developer end of the landscape, it is the pro development onment on these enterprise tools.

Rami Mounla: 6:39
Absolutely, you're 100% right. It really grinds my gears, mark, when someone uses terminologies like oh, it's just like Excel on steroids or Access on steroids or Access in the cloud or anything like that. I guess what a lot of organizations don't buy, and even organizations that decide to buy into a lot of organizations don't buy, and even organizations that decide to buy into the power platform and buy the licenses. What they don't understand is that they're buying a platform, they're buying an ecosystem, not just one app, but something way bigger than that. So if you think about all the capabilities that it offers you out of the box, that you don't have to worry about, then this is where the value is coming from. You know, starting from the security model that you get, which is quite robust, which integrates very well with your Azure AD or your Entra security model as well. This is something that you get for free, just by buying a license for that platform. If you think about all the different interfaces, be it a custom Canvas app that is pixel perfect, a model-driven app that is pre-designed for you, where you just drag and drop the elements you want, or, more specifically, the portal side of things right, this is where you enable it for a very large audience and then you allow them to go and use it. There's also that concept like every time we go and bid into a piece of work for the public sector, there's always that little paragraph that says we want you to do it out of the box, we want you to do it with no code, we want you to do it with low code. And, as consultants in the market, our responsibility is go and give them the direction and a little bit of education, to say hey, sometimes ProCode is there for a good reason. It will allow you to scale, it will allow you to deliver better quality, maintainable code, as opposed to something that you're forcing into a pattern that is not designed to deliver.

Rami Mounla: 8:29
So the analogy that I usually use is people saying that preservatives are bad in your food.

Rami Mounla: 8:36
Well, to a certain extent, you don't want to eat a lot of food that has preservatives, but you also don't want to eat food that requires preservatives, that does not have those preservatives, because that will make you sick and any food technician will tell you preservatives are there for a reason and it's all about education and understanding their value, and what happens is if you actually remove them.

Rami Mounla: 8:57
Same thing happens with low code and no code, where some organizations, some customers will force you to go down that route and then, if you do, you'll end up with a mess further down the track, especially for large scale projects. In fact, when I was doing my master's, you know, a good decade or more ago, I had a professor that worked at Bed Labs and over there AT&T they do millions of transactions for periods of time and so on and he taught us something. He said hey, when it comes to scale and performance, how pretty your code looks is not important. What's important is to make sure that you can cater for the non-functional requirements. And that's exactly what we're seeing, with people forcing to use, you know, good tools like Power Automate, but to do mass executions that go beyond the capability of the platform. So this is why being a good consultant in the market and find the right solution that fits the right requirements is very important for us.

Mark Smith: 10:25
I like that. I'd like you to and just to extend on that. And you know we've gone from a world where we just talked about our own platform to really it's the one Microsoft story. It's everything that Microsoft brings to bear in a project. It's no longer us just going, it's going to be a Dynamics implementation, it's going to be Azure, it's going to be M365. It's going to be Purview, it's going to be, you know, entry ID on the identity. It's going to allow for large scale of any type of application build. We're not just limiting ourselves to a single power platform story these days. I think that's important. Tell us a story or two because I know you've got more than one on where you have built these large-scale applications on the power platform that are, as you say, serving all of New Zealand in the public sector. Tell us kind of what was the problem, what was the challenge, what was your proposed solution and what's the outcome. The kind of, you know, typical um like sets the context for those that are listening.

Rami Mounla: 11:32
Yeah, absolutely. Uh, probably the most recent one is, uh is the most relevant one that I want to talk about because, um, when you and I were presenting in Vancouver, was it earlier this year? Yes, I was actually. I locked myself in a hotel in Vancouver for five days going live with one of those projects that I'll be talking about, and specifically this one is around the passport renewals. So anybody applying for a passport renewal and anybody applying for citizenship to become a citizenship in New Zealand, be it a citizenship by grant or citizenship by descent so you can imagine we've got a good portion of the population in New Zealand that actually do have passports or would like to apply for a passport. So you're talking about the majority of the New Zealand population. We're talking about the majority of the New Zealand population, but we don't only stop there, but we also go beyond that into people that are interested in coming to New Zealand and living in New Zealand and becoming New Zealand citizens. So it's beyond. The population of New Zealand is just a list of all the non-functional requirements to understand at what scale this is going to be executed, how many people are going to be coming in per day, even per hour, so that we can look at peak performances and then cater for that and also do our testing to make sure that the platform is going to address all of those things. The other thing that we looked at is a strong, robust design that will provide that scalability. And in order to get sort of a second view on it, we engaged Microsoft FastTrack to come and give us a hand. So their responsibility is just to make sure that you've got good adoption of the platform, but also that those large implementations are successful, and FastTrack only focuses on those really large products based on the number of licenses and also the number of users that will be using the platform itself. So internally, I think we've got about 600 users that are using the platform concurrently, and externally, we've got millions of people that use it. Just to give you an example per day there's 1,500 passport applications that are submitted, and right now it is especially that we've just released that new solution, so we had a bit of downtime, so the backlog was piling up. So the internal staff need to issue more than 2,000 passports a day so that they can keep on top of it and actually get on top of the backlog. So we're talking about large numbers of users, large transactions happening at the same time, but at the same time, there's some additional things that the Power Platform doesn't do.

Rami Mounla: 14:20
So, as you said, it's an ecosystem, it is a Microsoft ecosystem. So, using Entra, using Power Pages, power Autom, you submit a photo, an application photo If it's a renewal, most likely the Department of Internal Affairs will already have a picture of you as the authoritative photo in their system. And there's also something called liveness, where you take your phone and then you do a liveness session where it takes pictures of your face using your phone, and that's what we call the selfie image of your face using your phone, and that's what we call the selfie image, and those three images are triangulated together to make sure that you are who you are, you are alive and you're the same person that we've got on file. It's really fascinating technology to see how it all works together. But again, it goes beyond the Microsoft ecosystem and requires some third-party applications to be plugged in into all of those capabilities. So, the biometric even though Microsoft does a lot of biometric work, but there are specific products that the department wanted to use. So I had to ensure that all of those work seamlessly together from an end-user perspective, be it an external customer using the portal or an internal staff doing a password application, it's seamless, it looks like it was built. It was always meant to be part of that user interface.

Rami Mounla: 15:49
So we come up with that design, we make sure we've got the right layering in here and then we make sure that each component that we're using can scale up to the level that we want it to scale.

Rami Mounla: 16:00
So, for example, if you're using Portal and then you have a Power Automate in the middle and then you've got another Dataverse on the other side, dataverse may scale, portal might scale, but then you might have a bottleneck in Power Automate that would reach license limitations or could not be scaled up to a certain level, and things like that. So it always goes into the weakest link, right. And then this is where your point of failure is going to be. So we designed it so that everything can work as expected. We got the approval from the Microsoft FastTrack team that looked at it and then said, yep, that looks like a decent design that we're going to be implementing and move forward with. And then we implemented the whole capability using some low-code, some out-of-the-box, some pro-code components in there, and then we put it all into the different levels of testing, just to make sure that it's secure. Penetration testing is all good, that it's scalable, that it can meet all the numbers of simulated users that we've got, and then we release that into production.

Mark Smith: 16:58
Wow, wow. That's outstanding and I take it. Then there's also external factors, like printing of the actual physical passport that would have to be output to yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Rami Mounla: 17:09
So. There's all those extra peripheral things Like, for example, when you do a citizenship application, even though your application is approved, you are not a citizen until you attend the ceremony. So there's an event management aspect that also links to it. You need to make sure that you go and attend, that they go and check your attendance and so on, and then there's a lot of complications around oh, but I'm coming with my family, or there's four of us applying, or I've got guests and I need that many tickets. All of that management ties in into citizenship by grant application, and then you need to ensure all of that works nicely together. So, yeah, you're 100% right. Like the technology goes beyond what we think of when it's just the Microsoft world, into real life examples.

Mark Smith: 17:55
So a few things that came to mind. One PI information right Personally identifiable of any system. This is a system that leans into that and it needs to Were there any security concerns around using the Power Platform for this level of security of citizen data.

Rami Mounla: 18:12
Yes, there was, and that was part of our design right? So when we're doing the design, we are knowledgeable about all the legislation that tells you what you can and cannot do with the data and also, first and foremost, that you only need to capture what you need to use and nothing more than that, and you only need to retain it for a certain period of time for you to do your job and then, after that, you have to discard of that data. So this is one of the NFIs that we had on our mind the entire day as we were designing our solutions. Specifically, in New Zealand, we've got data sovereignty requirements and in that specific instance and actually dates back, when I ask around it dates back to the Second World War, something that happened in the Second World War that is probably beyond that podcast where they said you are not allowed to have one register that has all the information about an individual. So that's why we have a separate register for birth, a separate register for marriages, a separate register for name changes, separate register for passports, citizenship, death and so on. So each one of those are individual databases and they have to be stored on premise, and this is one of the issues because the Power Platform is now in the cloud are individual databases and they have to be stored on-premise. This is one of the issues because the Power Platform is now in the Cloud. But again, those are the constraints that you learn about during that project and you find ways to actually work around it. That is still legal. So, policy and legal.

Rami Mounla: 19:39
The two teams were highly involved in the design of the system.

Rami Mounla: 19:43
Just to make sure that we do follow all those processes, and just to tell you about the solution that we ended up doing, we actually built a custom page, custom page being basically a Canvas app that has several components into it that is just surfacing this data from all those registers that are stored in the local data centers in New Zealand. So we've got custom connectors that go and query the data from those registers and surfaces them back to the user. So again, from a user perspective, it looks as if it's part of the system, but behind the scenes, all of that is actually stored individually, separately, in their own respective repositories. So there's always a way to address it and Microsoft is knowledgeable about those requirements, right? So that's why they worked a lot on custom connectors. Like they don't say, ah, this is on-premise. We're not going to worry about it. You know it's old school. We're not going to give you an option to do it. No, they do provide those hybrid scenarios, those hybrid patterns and the capability to connect to those sources and then retrieve the information back.

Mark Smith: 20:47
Amazing what's the outcome been, because it's been live now for maybe two months.

Rami Mounla: 20:52
Yeah, so about two months. The outcome is actually quite interesting to see what impact it's having. So there's quite a lot of news coverage that is being sort of on top of it. The main reason for that is because there was a bit of delay in releasing some of those passports. So, as I said, there was a bit of a downtime for us to go live and then to make sure everything is available. But then on top of that, there was change management that kicked in.

Rami Mounla: 21:22
So people have been doing those passports for decades. They have muscle memory. We've seen them work with those blue screen systems, with those old legacy systems. They do it with their eyes closed. They know exactly where the shortcuts are. They all know how many clicks, how many tabs, how many enters they have to type to get their work done. Now move them away from whatever they used to and put them into a Dynamics 365 or into a Power Platform user interface. Then all of a sudden it's completely foreign for them.

Rami Mounla: 21:52
Yes, so it took the staff a while to actually get on top of it, to understand how to do things, because we also changed the process a little bit to fit more into the pattern that Dynamics and the Power Platform would provide out of the box. So there's a bit of change from that perspective. That caused a little bit of resistance from the users, but then a little bit of coaching, a little bit of champions walking the floors supported a lot with that implementation. The system was not perfect as well. We did notice that we've designed things that were maybe a bit too ambitious or looking at best case scenarios, whereas in reality, especially when we sat down and we looked at how they're using our system that we designed, we're like hang on, it's not designed to be used that way and if you do it that way, then it's going to take you more clicks or it's going to slow down your process. So the outcome was either like reinforced the training just to make sure that they do the right thing, or for us to adapt to the way they want to use the system and go.

Rami Mounla: 22:53
Actually, if we move those records or those attributes from here to there and then reformat that screen in there, all the requirements will still be met and then you guys will be doing it the right way. So it's a bit of a give and take right. So a large system like that, you will not expect it to go 100% just the moment it goes live. But you do expect to have a few hiccups at the beginning and then iron those out and in fact I usually say I'm okay. I'm actually happy when I see that people come to me and they say we've got a problem, those things are not working, because that means that they're using the system, that they believe in the system and, most importantly, that they can see ways of improving that system. So you take those on board, you bring them back into the product and then you release it and then you've got a good product.

Mark Smith: 23:38
I like it. Was there any other countries that you're aware of have used this kind of infrastructure, power, platform, dynamics, etc. For their passport management?

Rami Mounla: 23:50
For passport management not that I know of no, but we do have at DXC. We've got a lot of customers in Australia that use it for other purposes as well, and specifically around the mining industry. So there's a lot of like large scale implementations where they do use Dynamics 365 for big implementations like that. But for passports specifically, because originally a lot of people were looking for out-of-the-box options for passport management. And is there something out-of-the-box options for passport management? And is there something out-of-the-box? There are some, but they're specific to the legislation where they come from, right, so there may be some for the UK or for Canada. In fact, another project that I was working on a long time ago was the Land Information New Zealand LINZ. So they are responsible for registering every piece of land that is available in New Zealand. You know titles and you know as you sell properties and things like that. And yes, they went for an out-of-the-box product from Canada, from British Columbia, and very quickly they realized in New Zealand we do things differently, so it didn't really work out and then they had to look for other alternatives for that. So it didn't really work out and then they had to look for other alternatives for that. So it's always hit and miss when it comes to government departments, legislation specific to a country and what products they want to use in there, but it could be I mean, maybe not specifically for passports, because, you know, building passports, as I said, may be specific, but the ecosystem, the patterns, are definitely something that you can reuse somewhere else. So one of the things that I've noticed is that in most government departments you've got a pattern and your pattern is that there's a request that comes in from the public. There is maybe an initial check that goes to you know, did they do everything correctly, submitted all the information that we need, did they apply for the right thing, and so on, so an assessment. And then there is some validation that goes in terms of are they eligible for whatever they're asking for? They provide us the forms that we're after, and so on. And then there's a decision that is made right. So, yes, they will get it, or no, they will not get it, or they will get X or they get Y, and then that decision is then validated by someone else, like reviewed, approved, and then, once this is done, then something is fulfilled. So the customer will get whatever they ask for, or they get a rejection or whatever it is. So the pattern that I've noticed is request to fulfillment with a few flavors in there. Now remove passports out of that and put in, for example, the Lins example, where someone is saying I'm selling a house, I want to transfer my tax reform on person, to the other request to fulfillment. They submit all the information, we assess it, we make a decision, we approve it.

Rami Mounla: 26:33
Something changes in the background. Put it in the mining industry putting into any of the public sector requirements, the public sector requirements, that becomes a product that you can lift and shift and reuse, especially if you built it to be configurable, to be extendable, right? So you don't want to build it specifically for passports, where it says if this is a passport, then I'm going to do that. But you say this is a request and I know how to handle requests, but today the flavor is passport, so I'm going to do those extra things because this is what passport wants. Today there's a request for a certificate renewal. Ah, I know, okay, I know how to manage a request to fulfillment. Today it's a certificate requirement, I know how to manage that. So this is where the pattern becomes reusable for other organizations.

Mark Smith: 27:19
Nice, One of the things that I hear, and I've heard this message from enterprise architects. So you know, an enterprise architect's not down at the workload layer, right, they're not down at the nuance necessary of that activity, but they have heard the story that this platform is not enterprise grade, or they've come to that conclusion because of this low-code rhetoric that we have heard over time. And so what they say is like if we want to have an enterprise platform, we're going to use SAP. If we're going to have an enterprise platform, we're going to use Pega. If we're going to use an enterprise platform, we're going to use ServiceNow, and the power platform is not that enterprise platform. If they said this to you, how would you respond?

Rami Mounla: 28:10
I'll get really angry, and I hear that a lot. You've got to convince them, right, because?

Mark Smith: 28:15
they're going to buy. They're going to buy if they're convinced. So how would you handle it?

Rami Mounla: 28:21
You've pointed it out. So microsoft was, um, having a you know, their messaging was around empowering people, making sure that everybody can, can you know, work on that platform and so on. And some of the comments that I'm you know gave back with the feedback that I gave to microsoft is like, look, I work with those people, right, I know who they are. Those are the people that do their nine to five job. They're all already overloaded with what they have to deliver on their base, jobs they may like. If they're really enthusiastic about it, they may learn about the power platform. They may get enthusiastic about it for a month or two and then after that they'll be like you know what? I'm too busy doing my day to day job that I'm paid for, hey, can you please do that for me? Or two, three months down the track they'll forget all about it and then they go and get someone else to come in and do the work for them. So you're 100% right that Microsoft has been focusing a lot on that low-code, no-code bits. But I must say, watching the event at Build, they started to shift. So Build was talking a lot and maybe Build is more like targeted at pro devs, right, but they had a lot of like. Charles Lamanna was on stage. They were talking about those large scale implementations with Dynamics 365. There was a focus on look, we can do more with it. Right, we've got those big clients, we've got those big logos and they said you know where they have that slideshow with. You know the screen with all the different logos of those big, massive organizations. You know the car manufacturers and you know the government departments and all of that. So they were starting to shift that focus around that.

Rami Mounla: 29:58
But also, like some of the themes that they're talking about, governance. Right, if you're talking about large enterprise application, a platform, you need proper governance for it. You need control over it. That was one of our first concerns. When we saw the Power Platform, we said this looks like Lotus Notes, but it's in the cloud. You know everybody's going to start building those applications. They're going to get out of control. You know a five-minute, you know someone that built something for five minutes will become enterprise, important, an enterprise asset, and there's no way of controlling it.

Rami Mounla: 30:34
So they spent a lot of effort and time into ensuring that they've got that governance in place, that they control what you can do and who can do it and then ensuring that it's done the right way. There's a lot of support as well in terms of scalability. Again, if you're talking about something small like Access Lotus Node to Excel, then the scalability is not there. Microsoft is first in terms of, hey, we can have hundreds of thousands, millions of users running on our platform at the same time and then it will not slow down, it will work and I've experienced that firsthand. It performs. It works really well, right. So from a performance perspective, it's all there.

Rami Mounla: 31:10
But also look at the rest of the story. So you know we talked a little bit about security. Security again, first and foremost. In fact, the last 10 minutes of the keynote I think it was Scott Guthrie's keynote at Build was dedicated to security. Security is a team effort, as they were saying, and they were talking about all the different things that you can do to ensure that there's awareness, but also to ensure that you're doing things the right way in your platform and how you can ensure that everything is good.

Rami Mounla: 31:39
Talking about security, powerpages specifically has a meter for security, right, so you can go into your dashboard. It will tell you how secure your site is based on. You know the identity providers that you're using. You know all the bits that you've implemented on it, whether there are any security holes, whether there are things that you left open that you should close. You know the SSLs and the domains and so on. So it covers the entire spectrum of how secure your public-facing portal is. This is enterprise grade, right.

Rami Mounla: 32:09
And then also add to all of that the you know the mandatory ALM DevOps story. You know Microsoft is spending a lot of time ensuring that again, you've got enterprise tools that can help you promote your solutions from one environment to the other, following best practices, all the documentations about how to do it, how to do it right, what not to do. All of that works towards the story of ensuring that this is an enterprise-grade platform that is being able to use. Add on top of that, the success stories and the projects that I worked on are a very good example of those success stories where, hey, we've used it, we don't have any major problems with it, it's scaling, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do and we can monitor it, we can water it, we can feed it and, most importantly, a lot of it, especially with this cloud era, a lot of it is Microsoft's problem Securing your servers, making sure that they're patched, that no one has access to them, and so on.

Rami Mounla: 33:08
I don't worry about that. That's Microsoft's problem, right, ensuring that it's scalable, that they've got enough GPUs, cpus and the servers are scalable, and all that. That's all Microsoft's problem. You just tell them I need that many licenses and they'll make it work for you. So there's a lot of support and again I'll go back to FastTrack, right. So now they're doing the FastTrack recognized solution architects. There's a few of them that are available in the market. Those are the experts that have worked on large projects like that, not necessarily from Microsoft, right. So there's Microsoft FastTrack. But then there's also the Microsoft Recognized Solution Architects that are outside of Microsoft that works for vendors, and those are the ones that have had the battle scars and the war stories and they know how the platform works and how to get it to do whatever the large-scale applications need.

Mark Smith: 33:58
My final question to you is measurements of success, the outcomes for the passport. You know was their goal to just platform refresh. You know, app modernization, was that their original trigger or is ultimately they're wanting to? You know, when everything's, you know the flywheel's fully running on the platform will be be greater efficiencies. What was kind of the driving factor for them to want to replatform off whatever they were on?

Rami Mounla: 34:30
So to answer that question, I'll probably go back to the first day that I spent on that project and we had an official karakia. So you know, the Maori welcome. Yes, because it was part of being part of that family, which is the Department of Internal Affairs. And then going on their journey, the Deputy Chief Executive, maria Robinson, gave us a very touching speech. Touching speech. She talked about her experience 20 years ago dealing with the Department of Internal Affairs and how it is a New Zealander's right to actually get access to a passport or to register a birth or to be you know, to be a citizen and to get those services. It's part of your right. So what she said is that our first goal and most important goal is to provide the best service to the New Zealand citizens. And that was a very powerful message for me because I knew I had purpose and that's why I really love working on those projects, because we're making a difference in New Zealand.

Rami Mounla: 35:39
So our measure of success is are we providing the best solution possible for the New Zealand population to apply for a passport renewal, to apply for a citizenship, to apply for a certificate renewal or whatever it is? And yes, we have right, and this is specifically by leveraging digital. So think, yes, part of the modernization is part of it behind the scenes, like you don't want agent technology and all of that, but as you modernize, you leverage digital. You leverage the capabilities that you could not do on a paper application, that you could not do maybe 10 years ago, even with digital, where it used to be data. That is part of forms, right. So you've got a form, you fill in the data, you click on submit button, which is basically mirroring a paper application. Right Now we have things like hey, you have a passport number, tell us what it is, we will go fetch this information and we will know whether you actually do have a passport with us or not. You will be surprised, by the way, how many people that are foreigners use the New Zealand website to apply for their passport renewal, right.

Rami Mounla: 36:44
So, like you know, the Europeans or the Australians and they say, oh, how come I cannot renew my passport on the New Zealand passport?

Rami Mounla: 36:51
For the New Zealand passport You're not with us, but anyway. So leveraging digital to actually get the most out of it and improve that experience, like specifically in our context, we're talking about identity, proofing, right? So you say you are Mark Mark Smith. You've got a passport that can prove that, you've got a picture that can prove that and you've got the liveness video that you took that can also prove that Mark is alive and he's the one applying for that application. So we use the digital technology to go and check that all of that information is correct and do the identity proofing of Mark Smith and say, yes, this is Mark Smith and it is who he claims he is, and then that will accelerate significantly the time it takes to deliver your passport. This is our level of success. This is how we measure. It is that we're providing the best technology possible for the New Zealand population to be able to deliver those capabilities in the shortest amount of time possible.

Mark Smith: 37:52
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 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 nz365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.