Navigating Data and Strategy in the World of Power Platform
Ana Welch
Andrew Welch
Chris Huntingford
William Dorrington
FULL SHOW NOTES
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Thanks for listening 🚀 - Mark Smith
00:01 - Exploring Business Value and Impact
15:42 - Value Assessment and Strategic Judgment
27:25 - Motivation and Skill Development
Mark Smith: Welcome to the Ecosystem Show. We're thrilled to have you with us here. We challenge traditional mindsets and explore innovative approaches to maximizing the value of your software estate. We don't expect you to agree with everything. Challenge us, share your thoughts and let's grow together. Now let's dive in. It's showtime. Well, welcome back to the Ecosystem Show. It's another week.
Andrew Welch: You can't even keep a straight face.
Mark Smith: That's it right, we have this like little silence before we get started and everyone's waiting in anticipation what's next? Well, welcome back for those of you that are the loyal OneWorth listener that we do have, or watcher of the show, and that would be you, nathan. Thank you for watching. We appreciate you. By the way, that word appreciate you. Has that become such a big word out of America lately? What? Oh, I appreciate you.
Andrew Welch: Oh, I appreciate this, I appreciate you. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark Smith: Oh man it. I appreciate you. Oh yeah, yeah, oh man, it grinds my gears.
Andrew Welch: It's meant to be a more sincere way of saying thank you. Yeah, well, let's just say thank you it's. I appreciate you Well, but if you use more syllables. It seems more sincere because you put more effort into it.
Mark Smith: Wow, it's just become such a cliche at the moment, like particularly what I notice it in, and I'm a bit embarrassed to say this. But love at first sight what is that?
Chris Huntingford: I still don't understand what this show is uk edition this here is the trashy, uh, the trashy dating show. Episode of the ecosystem show I will not watch this junk when they say this to each other.
Andrew Welch: I appreciate you, but I'm out like are you serious, like yuck you have no idea how often I'm going to tell you about my appreciation for you mark now regularly. I appreciate you classic.
Mark Smith: So we're recording this one week out from all, getting on planes, trains and automobiles and flying away to the lights of Las Vegas, where we will spend lots of money in the casino, we'll entertain, we'll learn about the power platform, we'll probably have a quiet dinner with Charles LaManna.
Chris Huntingford: Speak for yourself, pal.
Mark Smith: Won't be quiet. Is that what you're saying?
Chris Huntingford: No, quiet dinner. Yeah, that's pretty much it.
Andrew Welch: Yeah, it's never quiet. Have you ever been somewhere like we're in public with Charles LaManna, where there's people from Microsoft land walking past right? You can't get 30 seconds into a conversation without someone just just mobbing him for a selfie.
Mark Smith: Yeah, poor guy yeah, honestly, I feel sorry for somebody in that position in that because you, like you see him take he. He uses what I call the standard fig leaf pose. Have you heard of the fig leaf pose for? Have you? Heard of the fig leaf pose for photos. The fig leaf pose is where you put both hands together and you cover your balls.
Mark Smith: It's called the fig leaf pose and it's like. It's one of those things like if you haven't been taught about how you know in photography and stuff they teach you, you know, if you're going to pose for something, if it's bendable, you should bend it. Have you heard that term?
Mark Smith: yes, actually I have so, in other words, the elbow bends, bended a bit in the pose, benyon, like let your knee move a bit like, yeah, not the t-rex, but because it brings it brings kind of gravitas to your, your photo, you know, your selfie, or whatever it is it's gonna be. Can we have?
Andrew Welch: a rule. Can we have a rule? Can we have a rule when we are in Vegas, since all four of us will be there that if one of us sees someone else with their hands kind of folded behind their back, that is the sign for I need help Please come help me with this conversation. And if anybody if I'm talking with anyone at vegas who sees me do that and you recognize it from the show I will buy you a drink can, I, can, I wouldn't be.
Chris Huntingford: Have you ever seen the show teledegan nights the first five, the first five. Have you ever seen the show teledegan nights, the movie? No, I mean, if you're not first, you're last but he doesn't know what to do with his hands. He's just like this. Please, can you just do your whole?
Mark Smith: talk like this. It's funny that you say that, because have any of you seen Emily in? Paris. No, Her boss. Whenever she walks she always walks with her hands, kind of like, and she's an older lady, but always, yeah, it's weird.
Andrew Welch: That's so funny Is that and I don't know if we have Anna back yet, but that might be Emily in Paris, might be the show that our two-and-a-half-year-old is weirdly into, because I guess Emily or one of the main characters looks like her aunt, her aunt Diana.
Mark Smith: She's from Chicago, emily, yeah, and like she's an American in Paris. It's really good, mate, it's brilliant. Anyhow, let's get underway, because we're well underway already and those coming to listen to the technical prowess of the people on the show are not getting anything technical.
Andrew Welch: They're just getting chin-wagging shit.
Mark Smith: One of the things as we warm up, I'll bring to the table. A couple of weeks ago, a gentleman in Microsoft by the name of do you remember his name? Steve Jeffrey, Steve Jeffrey. He released, or he published, on August 20, 2024. We're going to let Anna back in. He published a document called the Introduction to the Businessth 2024. We're going to let Anna back in. He published a document called the Introduction to the Business Value Toolkit, and it's obviously another kit that's coming out of the CAT team.
Mark Smith: What struck me on this is that it really allows the measurement of the impact of the power platform inside an organization Yep Down to the apps, the power platform inside an organization, down to the apps, the automations, et cetera. So, in other words, rather than you know, yesterday was published the Forrester Total Economic Impact Report for 2024 on the power platform, which has some numbers that totally blow away the past reports in the space and over 200% ROI within six months, like some crazy numbers right being delivered. And then what I love about this toolkit is that this applies to your own environment, your own environments, your own tenants, so that you can really understand the impact. Because what I've noticed, particularly in large implementations, when, internally, they go to senior leadership for budget to do more in the following years of using the platform, they often don't have. The folks don't have evidence of the impact that they're creating inside the organization, Like what's the financial impact of these solutions we've deployed?
Mark Smith: What's the? You know what's the. You know what is the. Is it a cost reduction? Is it a profit increase? Did we avoid getting litigated against, you know, if it was a compliance-related thing? They've got no tooling to actually structure something that could be presented to the executive that says, hey, isn't this amazing what we retrieved in the last 12 months?
Andrew Welch: give us some more budget to do more for this great stuff this is something that that I feel like we've been we, the big, you know, the big community and industry has been struggling with for a long time, and it's not limited to power platform. I think we should get into later on in the conversation what the application of this is for AI workloads or for, you know, data products and investment in a data platform, et cetera, and how and how it transfers. But I think that's one of the big challenges that that I've had over the years. Right is that I'm a technologist, right, I'm an architect. I am not an organizational economist, I'm not an accountant. I'm not. I have no personal specialty or expertise in business value assessment, and you know, so I think that that a lot of and this is, of course, true across the industry.
Andrew Welch: So there's a lot of people, a lot of organizations that have really failed to make quantitative dollars and cents, pounds and pennies, euros and whatever hundreds of a euro are called cents, I guess, anyway, have failed to make these arguments because, one, many people lack the expertise and there hasn't been a good tool. Many people lack the expertise and there hasn't been a good tool. I mean, there's been this tool called shark finesse that you know, those of us have been in this for a while. You know, know and have used, but shark finesse is not the most approachable thing for a novice Over the top right.
Mark Smith: It isn't extreme, so extreme that people just stop using it because it was too cumbersome in and and what it was doing yeah, I don't, I don't understand.
Chris Huntingford: I mean, I get, I get the tooling, but, like man, my p-brain doesn't deal with, deal with that type of stuff. I think, I think so I I get this all the time right. When we talk to organizations about what is the roi, what is the value, yeah, like struggle with this a lot, and it's mainly because when organizations adopt the tools like Microsoft Office, they didn't ROI every email they sent or every Excel they made. They didn't go. What's the ROI on the spreadsheet that I'm going to make? They just naturally assumed that, well, it's part of business productivity. So this is something we should do, right. And when email came out, they didn't go. What is the ROI of me sending this email to any of you? It wasn't a thing, it was just considered business productivity. Yeah, and then I get why you need to do ROI against things.
Chris Huntingford: But the problem that I have is that when you look at the tools like Steve has got and I think it's a good tool, by the way, I think it's a good tool. I've seen it in action, I know how it works, I understand what he's done I feel like this is going to be overkill, and I'll tell you why? Because every organization that's got any, every CFO that's got anything to do with a implementation of a platform, is going to say what is the ROI on every app or flow that you make? And you can't do that? It doesn't work Like. I get anchor apps? Yes, absolutely yeah for sure. But I think that when organizations get over, carried away with ROI, it becomes more of an inhibitor than anything else, and that's what I found.
Mark Smith: Yeah, but I think you're arrogant, chris.
Ana Welch: And that's what I found.
Chris Huntingford: Yeah, but I think you're arrogant, Chris. Is that because I refuse to sell any AI solutions that haven't gone through a governance board? I heard that was a thing as well.
Mark Smith: Classic man Classic. No, what I was going to say is that you know, for me, in a tool like this, I'd be squarely in a team, not squealing. I would be going to my PM, my PM just as part of the delivery process, or whoever the program manager is. This is a tool that you need to own and deliver the outputs back to the executive. It's just part of doing the job type thing. It's not a one-time point thing that we do.
Ana Welch: I think that tooling like that is very useful, because oftentimes our job is to actually help the CTO or the CEO to show value, or the CEO to show value, and they haven't got time to listen to us go on about technology and AI and about waves of adoption and enhancements and stuff like that. What they want to do is be able to have a one-pager that says we are better than anyone else because we use this technology, and the result is this much ROI, the end that that's all they want, and so having a tool for that is brilliant, because, for for now, we're making it up, right, yeah I just see it allows for store good storytelling right.
Mark Smith: I just watched recently lumen technologies in the us. They have done a big ai piece inside the organization. It's probably one of my microsoft's hero case studies right now around Copilot implemented and they've got some amazing stats that have come out and the stats tell a great story right. Four hours saved per sales agent. That's a $54,000 per person per annum cost saving. It's just like data points like that. They ran a hackathon and saved 4,000 hours from some of the ideas that came out. It's like those dot points that business goes whoa. This is amazing, like let's do more and it's just really giving the kind of gravitas to let's keep doing more of this, because these are exciting stories that have been told and a tool like this potentially gives you those numbers.
Ana Welch: It doesn't matter whether you're a developer or a project manager, or you are the team lead or the practice leader, it doesn't matter who you are. Sort of tools and being able to articulate what the results of your work is are um will propel your career, and that's that's very important right, if we are to live in a, in an era of um, even human connection. If you will and if you want to progress and learn new skills which we must do we need to have. This is one of the prerequisites, I think Nice.
Chris Huntingford: Yeah, it is, but okay, so I'm going to kind of, I'm going to agree, but I'm going to come back with detail. How many organizations do you know you can go to and say can you define the concept of value? Yeah, because this tool requires you to put in value concepts as, like, line items. Okay, and it's the same thing, okay. My favorite one is this I had a conversation with somebody recently.
Chris Huntingford: We were talking about the criticality of a solution. So I said, cool, cool, cool. Define criticality. Like what does critical mean to you? And they were like, well, you know, if it creates downtime in the office, I'm like, yeah, but you can still do it manually, right, like you can still do the thing manually. So, like, think about the concept of criticality and what does that mean? Now, switch that over to value. Like what does value mean to you? And if you go to the CFO, value is crap, loads of money saved If you go to the CEO, retaining people and creating time, and then. So you have to basically build out value concepts, and that's why this tool is cool, but it is an end product to a much bigger play here, and that play is defining the whole ecosystem before you put things into a bunch of boxes.
Andrew Welch: I've been thinking about this, and then I'll use an example from outside of tech, but one of the things that I worry about is that our society has lost, I think, in a lot of ways, the ability to make judgments as to the goodness or the badness, or the usefulness or the non usefulness or the. You know, we've lost a lot of our ability, or maybe a lot of our confidence, in making judgments about things if we don't have some sort of study or some sort of data to to prove it. And so here's a good example Anna and I, after we record this, are going to go cycling. Okay, we love to do that. It's something that I've done for many years, and that is my exercise right Now. I don't need a watch with data about how many calories I burned, right To tell me that cycling is good. It makes me feel good, it is enjoyable, it is fresh air, it is sunshine. You know what I mean. It is all of these sorts of things.
Andrew Welch: But so often, and particularly in business, I think that leaders hide behind what they perceive to be a lack of data or a lack of you know, god has provided these figures and therefore the thing is good. And I, when I say hide behind it. I think that we we often use this. Oftentimes, when I hear someone say, well, what's the ROI of that app? Or what's the ROI of that, you know? As Chris says, what's the ROI of that spreadsheet? Right?
Andrew Welch: I often hear a I don't want to have to make a strategic judgment. Yes, so I. Therefore I'm going to invoke somehow a lack of data in order to defend my inaction in doing in making a strategic judgment. Love it. So you know, I don't think that we should. You know, I think that I said at the beginning, I think that this business value assessment and this ability for laymen lay persons who don't specialize in this field to be able to measure ROI, that is 100% a good thing. But what I want, what I also think we need to be careful of, is that we don't use this as yet another way to hide behind actually being leaders, right, and actually making strategic judgments. That's important.
Mark Smith: If I do something like that and I realize I haven't got my Apple Watch on or my Aura Ring, I'm like, did it even count? Because I didn't measure it.
Mark Smith: And the thing is, I am a data-driven person and I see those results and I'm like I'm going to do that again tomorrow Like it's a motivating thing for me. And I think what and if I draw the parallel to this tool, is that I'm not talking about this tool upfront in a project. I'm talking about if you have the platform as a strategic tool inside your organization and you're going to have programs of work that are going to run year after year after year. It is good that you have quantified the value that it brings, because people hire up that are not day-to-day, they don't know the technology, they don't know the value and they're making a decision between this and 500 other products. I think that drives value when you can quantify what your technology is producing for the organization. As to you know, bob that doesn't have any idea the value his SAP platform or Pega platform is bringing.
Ana Welch: I also think that what Chris was saying earlier, and how hard it is to set this tool up and how much thinking you have to do in advance, isn't that part of strategy. So the moment you're committing to using it, you're like, okay, so now I'm going to have to do all this hard work, and if they cannot do it themselves, that's what we're consultants, right?
Chris Huntingford: That's exactly it. Yeah, Anna, that's what I was getting at. It's looking at it and you're right. So I wouldn't go to a company and be like, yeah, have the business value toolkit why.
Andrew Welch: No, it's kind of like Well, that's what we did with the COE starter kit. Yes, we did.
Chris Huntingford: Yeah, here have governance.
Andrew Welch: This is governance. Here you go.
Chris Huntingford: We screwed it up right, I think, with this tool and I love, anna, what you said there because, as I said, I go through this with customers all the time. I go through BVA type stuff I'll go through what is ROI, what is value, what is qualitative, what is quantitative, what does it mean to you? So I sit in these change management workshops driving these types of behaviors and we log them in Excel, right. So we're like, okay, let's put them in that Excel spreadsheet and we can track ROI against that. What I find interesting here is that, yes, it's a framework, but it's what I think is clever in the stool. It's the overlay on all of it that he's got, because he's got some very, very clever maths and some AI that actually does some pretty impressive things on top of those numbers. So once you've gone through the iceberg… of the bottom part of the iceberg, of what is all the value nonsense, and you get to that top layer, I feel like this is where the value is in this tool.
Andrew Welch: Yeah, and I think that the tool needs to be accompanied by, like it needs to be paired also with an approach right? Yes, so we talk all the time about anchor apps and one of the things that I see organizations doing with with power platform right is that, if anything, organizations are not ambitious enough with how they use power platform. They make this big investment, they maybe do some work around you know platform governance and getting the thing set up, and then what they do is they use Power Platform for trivial or little productivity, toy type apps. They don't build the anchor apps that are really necessary in order to move the needle on value. Or they say, oh, we'll build the anchor apps later.
Andrew Welch: And if you look at kind of the cost curve of a composable economic strategy, which I just Mark I don't know if you saw I just covered this in a lesson I recorded for this course. It's coming out in a couple of weeks, but you know, anchor apps, building the anchor apps, swinging for the fences, so to speak, early on in the adoption, is how you're going to drive a lot of that value and how you're going to bank a lot of that value so that you can then go build some of the niche use cases or the more niche type scenarios. So I would say, take this tool and pair it with a strategy that front loads modernization or net new development of big anchor apps, and then measure the value, not of the thing for the finance team that no one else knows about, but use it to measure the value of the big anchor apps. That's why we call them anchor apps. They anchor your implementation of Power Platform across the ecosystem. That's the value you should measure.
Chris Huntingford: Yeah, nice. So, dude, if you think so, think about it like this. I have, in any Power Platform state or AI state, right now I use the concept of T-shirt sizing from a solution perspective. So there are certain categories that a solution gets bopped into right. So, if you take like five categories extra small all the way to extra large, okay, pretty straightforward. So extra smalls, smalls and mediums, like they have certain criteria.
Chris Huntingford: Number one I don't actually care where you build extra smalls, build them in default. I don't give a damn IT, don't support your default environment, so therefore I don't care. Correct, okay, makers support their own tools. I don't care about your analytics, Sort it out yourselves. Whereas mediums, actually, that's getting onto the blurred line of this is where the process is different.
Chris Huntingford: So, if you think about a journey that you draw for a maker, if you think about a line splitting out into three forks, okay, three prongs. The first prong is straight. It's like extra smalls and smalls in default. No one cares, crack on and do your thing. But then you have this medium line at the top and that's like, actually, you're building something a little bit more complex. You want to involve more team members, but you want to be doing BVA against this. You want to be saying what is the return on investment of us spending time on this thing? So part of your maker journey is actually adding in this piece of the process. So instead of a five-step process to productionizing something, it is now a 12-step process because you're going to go through a much more stringent set of rules and that's where the stuff comes in.
Mark Smith: Yeah, and that's where the stuff comes in?
Andrew Welch: Yeah, so so shall we. Um, I'm looking at the at the clock mark. Shall we uh, uh, preview a little bit from the the conference that when this episode airs, the conference will be next week. Should we uh? Should we finish off that way? Yeah?
Mark Smith: Yeah, I think that'd be great. As in, we're all excited, yeah right.
Andrew Welch: Yeah, all of us yes all of us.
Mark Smith: All of us. So, andrew, what are you thinking?
Andrew Welch: So the I don't know how much we should give away, but I should say this We've got, um, we've got one major, major, major piece of content, or big thinking, or um, uh, something that that folks can use, uh, in their daily work. That's going to come out each day of the conference. So we've got a new white paper Scaling your Enterprise Cloud with Power Platform. We've been collaborating with another organization on a white paper called the ecosystem oriented architecture for the public sector. And then we have a bit of a surprise, but I'll say this a framework and a model to help organizations not just get started with their artificial intelligence journey, but to to also measure their maturity and to measure their progress and to really understand, kind of, where they are and target their investments in the most effective ways. So that has been a mammoth project and we're really excited to release it.
Andrew Welch: And then Mark's got one as well that he's been working on. Have I got one or three? It depends on how you want to slice it. I mean, go for it. So one of the things we're doing on the Cloud Lighthouses he's been working on have I got one or three, it depends on how you want to slice it.
Mark Smith: I mean, yeah, go for it so we've one of the things we're doing under cloud lighthouse is is getting a bunch of our ip consumable and and that is because in a lot of the events that have been presented at, people are like, yeah, but you know, this seems to be this workshop is part of a much broader way of thinking, et cetera.
Mark Smith: And so how do I get more? And so what we've done is set up a learncloud lighthouse that you can go to, and we're going to start we plan to drop three courses next while the conference is on and so you can go deeper into a lot of these thinkings If you're in an architectural role and you really need can go deeper into a lot of these thinkings if you're in architectural role, when you really need to go deeper, um, we've got three courses which are just small ones to start with, but they're leading into some very um, deep thinking, precise thinking around ecosystems and around ai strategies, which are not productcentric but really much more broader in empowering you in the way you think about projects, solutions that you're going to implement, etc.
Andrew Welch: Well, and I feel like we've been talking about training for ecosystem architects for so long now that we're finally doing it. The first courses have been recorded, so they're on their way yeah, hooray so we're dropping them anywhere.
Ana Welch: Yeah, it was a cell five, you can't see.
Chris Huntingford: Yeah, cell five I love it. Cell five I like it highly.
Mark Smith: I respect man so, yeah, looking forward to it. Love to get your feedback. If you're at the conference, come and see us. Come say hi, come and uh, if you hit me up and say, hey, I heard your heard your uh ecosystem show there and you promised to buy me a drink, I will buy you a drink if you come up and tell me that.
Andrew Welch: Um, so yeah, looking forward to seeing you all is that an open invitation or just the first five?
Mark Smith: just the first. No, it's an open invitation it's.
Andrew Welch: It's an open invitation.
Mark Smith: It's an open invitation. It's an open invitation.
Ana Welch: Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah yeah, that's wild.
Mark Smith: Oh, I tell you what I did. Something just to wrap with I like to buy motivation. Have you ever heard this concept of buying motivation?
Andrew Welch: No, no, no, you mean like you go buy a new backpack.
Chris Huntingford: I mean because that's what I do when I want to get my money, Dude you and your backpacks.
Mark Smith: It's a problem.
Chris Huntingford: It is a problem.
Mark Smith: So this is what I did. There's a lady that I follow in the AI space and you know there's so much around AI and there's so much snake oil and stuff out there and everybody's got a new AI product, you know, and this lady is on the Forbes 30 under 30 or whatever. She's exited her first AI business already and she's 29 years old and she just gives away tons and tons of the way she's thinking about stuff. And so she dropped this video. That said, I've never been on social media, but 100 days ago I joined social media and she goes I, just a hundred days later, had a hundred thousand followers from a standing zero, start, right. And she, all she did was this was her model Every day, I'll post at least one video, but I'll try to do five videos a day. Hence why you're seeing me drop these videos, cause I.
Mark Smith: This is what I did. I'm like man, this is a great idea 100 videos in 100 days, but potentially 500 videos in 100 days, right, five a day. And so I was like, damn, I'm going to do that. It was just like an instant, like I'm going to do that. So I'm going to face the camera. It's a new way of doing stuff. I'm going to give that a crack and I was like let's buy some motivation. So I went to a WhatsApp group that I have of the alumni community that have been through the 90 Day Mentoring Challenge, and so over 1,200 people have been through the 90 Day Mentoring Challenge, so there's a few people in there and so I said I will give $1,000 to anybody the first person that points out the first day that I miss posting a video in the next 100 days.
Chris Huntingford: That's genius. See that's buying motivation. That's genius. I think that's really clever and also expensive.
Mark Smith: Right, I don't want to give away $1,000 US. So, man, I get up in the morning I'm like bang, what am I going to do today? What's my video going?
Andrew Welch: to be on. Oh my God.
Mark Smith: I find social media to be so overwhelming and so exhausting. There's no way but. But the thing is, for me it's. It's not the social media, it's. I'm getting a new skill right which has been able to make sure that you can communicate a concept in a very short amount of time and do it in a way that connects with the other person I'm out and that's.
Mark Smith: You know, it's not about being verbose, right, it's been about absolutely concise, terse to the point. So, yeah, it's, it's uh, it's a skill I want to develop, and I'm just, whilst also not being gen z I don't think that anyone is watching Mark's videos thinking, look at that Gen Z guy, look at that Gen Z.
Ana Welch: What I mean is that you didn't necessarily learn this in school or you didn't have to do. You weren't in the Snapchat generation where you had to summarize a thing in 30 seconds or less. You're not doing TikTok every day and it's like super easy for you. It's hard, you know these things are hard. It's a new muscle. I was just reading this article that that was saying that we should all look for for new jobs because jobs are changing all around us, even if you aren't changing your jobs. So that's yeah. I thought that was a very, very interesting concept, so I guess it ties a little bit into into what you're saying. It's just for you know, building a new skill potentially a very expensive way of building a new skill, but yeah, yeah, yeah only only if I don't deliver right.
Mark Smith: Anyhow, love you all. See you next time, see you later, dudes. Bye, bye, bye, guys, bye. Thanks for tuning into the ecosystem show. We hope you found today's discussion insightful and thought-provoking, and maybe you had a laugh or two. Remember your feedback and challenges help us all grow, so don't hesitate to share your perspective. Stay connected with us for more innovative ideas and strategies to enhance your software estate. Until next time, keep pushing the boundaries and creating value. See you on the next episode.
William Dorrington is the Chief Technology Officer at Kerv Digital. He has been part of the Power Platform community since the platform's release and has evangelized it ever since – through doing this he has also earned the title of Microsoft MVP.
Andrew Welch is a Microsoft MVP for Business Applications serving as Vice President and Director, Cloud Application Platform practice at HSO. His technical focus is on cloud technology in large global organizations and on adoption, management, governance, and scaled development with Power Platform. He’s the published author of the novel “Field Blends” and the forthcoming novel “Flickan”, co-author of the “Power Platform Adoption Framework”, and writer on topics such as “Power Platform in a Modern Data Platform Architecture”.
Chris Huntingford is a geek and is proud to admit it! He is also a rather large, talkative South African who plays the drums, wears horrendous Hawaiian shirts, and has an affinity for engaging in as many social gatherings as humanly possible because, well… Chris wants to experience as much as possible and connect with as many different people as he can! He is, unapologetically, himself! His zest for interaction and collaboration has led to a fixation on community and an understanding that ANYTHING can be achieved by bringing people together in the right environment.
Partner CTO and Senior Cloud Architect with Microsoft, Ana Demeny guide partners in creating their digital and app innovation, data, AI, and automation practices. In this role, she has built technical capabilities around Azure, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and—most recently—Fabric, which have resulted in multi-million wins for partners in new practice areas. She applies this experience as a frequent speaker at technical conferences across Europe and the United States and as a collaborator with other cloud technology leaders on market-making topics such as enterprise architecture for cloud ecosystems, strategies to integrate business applications and the Azure data platform, and future-ready AI strategies. Most recently, she launched the “Ecosystems” podcast alongside Will Dorrington (CTO @ Kerv Digital), Andrew Welch (CTO @ HSO), Chris Huntingford (Low Code Lead @ ANS), and Mark Smith (Cloud Strategist @ IBM). Before joining Microsoft, she served as the Engineering Lead for strategic programs at Vanquis Bank in London where she led teams driving technical transformation and navigating regulatory challenges across affordability, loans, and open banking domains. Her prior experience includes service as a senior technical consultant and engineer at Hitachi, FelineSoft, and Ipsos, among others.