Empowering Government Transformation with Low-Code Tools with Emma-Claire Shaw

Mark Smith: 0:01
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, like everything on the Power Platform show, we're going to be focusing on the Power Platform and particularly on implementation in the United Kingdom. Today's guest is from the UK. She is a low-code product manager and consultant at Defra, which we'll find out what that's all about shortly. She's a creative and energetic leader focusing on technology that can create positive change in the world. You can find links to her bio, social media, et cetera, in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, mma.

Emma Claire Shaw: 0:54
Thanks, ark, it's really nice to be here.

Mark Smith: 0:56
Great to have you on the show. I always like to start with a little getting to know you segment, which is so people can see you outside of your tech role and outside of the discussions we'll have about the Power Platform. So tell me about food, family and fun.

Emma Claire Shaw: 1:12
So I'm going to start with family, because I've just returned to work from my second adoption leave. So I've got two gorgeous little girls who are almost two and six. So they keep me very busy and I always say give me great stakeholder management skills. Also, I live with the love of my life, which is my dog, who helps keep me active and just bring so much joy to my life as I'm sure any dog owners would agree. And then finally there's my husband, um, who always gets mentioned last.

Emma Claire Shaw: 1:46
Um, I'm fun. I mean mostly lots of socializing with my friends. So, um, love going out for live music, going to music festivals. Um, we were just chatting about dynamics minds before before this and you mentioned the sort of festival feel, so I feel like that should be next on my list. Yes, yes, I also really like keeping fit and active. I find that helps keep me sane. So I'm an early gym bunny before the kids get up, and I love trail running with the dog. And I practice Iyengar yoga as well, which helps keep me calm amongst all the chaos, especially in this technology area where everything's always moving so fast and it can get quite stressful.

Emma Claire Shaw: 2:24
Yes, area where everything's always moving so fast and it can get quite stressful. Yes, and then on to food. Well, I'm a bit of a kind of split personality when it comes to food, so I'm very much a chocoholic, um. So I was in heaven this year at the european power platform conference because that was in belgium. So I spent a bit of time between sessions working my way around um the chocolate shops and the praline shops, which was great. But on the flip side of that addiction, I'm also quite interested in nutrition. I follow mostly a plant-based diet, aside from all the chocolate, and I'm really interested in all the kind of new research around the gut microbiome and the impact it has on kind of whole body health. So trying to weave that into my family's lives as well. So, yeah, a bit of a mixed, split personality kind of person really across the board.

Mark Smith: 3:06
This is so interesting. I don't want to derail where we're going to go, but I've been heavily invested in this space for the last, probably this year particularly around the gut microbiome, as you say, and the biggest impact that I have added to my diet is Celtic salt.

Emma Claire Shaw: 3:28
Celtic salt.

Mark Smith: 3:29
Yeah, and this is a salt that's extracted, that has, I think it's got 82 minerals in it. It's not bleached, it's basically extracted, put in the bag and it's a damp, a damp salt, so it absorbs moisture. It's not dried out, it's got no added anything and it came from the study of farmers. You know, I was brought up on a dairy farm and we used to always put what was called a lick, a block, out for the stock and this was a big block and all it was was minerals, and the cows you know that wouldn't get the minerals necessary from the grass they were eating would lick this block and whenever you were going to sell the cows at market and fatten them up for sale, you would take the lick block away from the paddock and what would happen is in with about 11 days, the cows would start to overeat, so they would eat excessive amounts trying to get the minerals that they needed for their body and of course, they would put on weight really quickly.

Mark Smith: 4:36
And so I don't know, three months ago I started taking it. Probably. I started at about a quarter of a teaspoon. I'm now up to half a teaspoon. Every time I drop it into a glass of water, and I'll do that two, sometimes three times a day and hunger, cravings gone.

Emma Claire Shaw: 4:54
Oh, that is so fascinating. Do you think it could fix my chocolate cravings? Well, not all cravings need fixing, right?

Mark Smith: 5:03
Not all cravings need fixing. Well, not all cravings need fixing, right? Not all cravings need fixing. And you know, I think I've just about dropped 15 kgs in the last. Wow, what was that? Probably in the well this year, definitely. And as you're talking about chocolate and stuff, I'm actually on a detox right now and my detox means water only, and I am on day five of water only no food at all no food at all oh my god, that just makes me feel panicked inside.

Mark Smith: 5:35
I don't know how you're doing that here's the crazy thing, though, as in because you mentioned yoga. Which triggered me to say this is that because I got a lot of lower back pain about two days into the fast, and they say that it's probably a magnesium or potassium deficiency, and your muscles start. A lot of toxins are stored in the lower part of your back that you've accumulated over years, and so as they release it, it's uncomfortable, it's extremely uncomfortable, like I cannot sleep because it's so uncomfortable, and so, yeah, having the salt again in the water has definitely been helpful for that, but I have not felt hungry once at all. I haven't felt like, oh, I should be eating, I should be, you know, and nothing at all. And so my goal is to do seven days. So I've got two days to go, oh, my gosh Madness.

Emma Claire Shaw: 6:23
And so my goal is to do seven days, so I've got two days to go. Oh my gosh Madness.

Mark Smith: 6:25
And I just know it'll be a no brainer I'll be able to achieve it. But yeah, I've been doing intermittent fasting all this year. Pretty much so that means I eat an eight hour window and 16 hours, nothing apart from water.

Emma Claire Shaw: 6:41
I'm going to send you a link to a book after we've chatted. I saw this lady talking about the gut microbiome at the Abergavenny Food Festival a couple of weekends ago and one of the ladies had a whole chapter about fasting in her book and she was talking about the pros and cons. So you should have a little read.

Mark Smith: 6:59
I will, I will.

Emma Claire Shaw: 7:00
Although I mean I'm still very impressed because I can't imagine it and I'm going to look up the Celtic salt.

Mark Smith: 7:05
Yeah, and what about the other one is have you looked into apple cider vinegar?

Emma Claire Shaw: 7:13
I haven't, but I've heard lots about it. I've been going for the 30 whole foods and fruit and veg a week.

Mark Smith: 7:22
Nice, nice. So I've got into growing hormone veg.

Emma Claire Shaw: 7:26
Yeah, that's amazing.

Mark Smith: 7:34
Good for you. Yeah, and it's just so. I don't know there's something so awesome when you can take your kids out to the garden and they're wanting to pull up the carrots and eat them right there. You're just washing them and they're eating them straight away. And the fresh peas? They're just popping the pods open and they're eating them away. And and the fresh peas? They're just popping the pods open and eating them. And best way to eat them, they really like, like the, you know, straight from the garden, and so my goal is on my property is to grow every type of fruit, so every month there's an abundance of fruit for that month, whatever the season season is. So, yeah, I recently just planted like 12 orange trees, all different varieties Amazing. That's so cool. It is so fun when you start to really become mindful about what you eat rather than just the. You know. I mean, I heard a stat something like 80% of all food that is sold in the supermarket didn't exist 70 years ago.

Emma Claire Shaw: 8:26
Wow, yeah, it's crazy, isn't it Like?

Mark Smith: 8:28
it's all made up, processed food that just didn't exist 70 years ago.

Emma Claire Shaw: 8:32
You're so ready for the apocalypse, then, mark, you can go seven days without food. You've got all the food you need when you are ready to eat.

Mark Smith: 8:40
Yes, yes, yes, perfect.

Emma Claire Shaw: 8:42
Yes.

Mark Smith: 8:43
One thing I haven't got is I haven't got chickens. So one day I'll get chickens so I can get my egg supply. Yeah, I do think that eggs are a good protein source, but then I've got, like around me, I think, about 10 beaches which allow me to fish as well, but I haven't developed a fishing habit yet. Anyhow, we digress, we digress.

Emma Claire Shaw: 9:04
We'll come back to fishing, though. Yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 9:07
Tell me about DEFRA.

Emma Claire Shaw: 9:10
So DEFRA stands for the Department for Environment, food and Rural Affairs, so it's the central government department in the UK. So as a central government department it's very much the kind of policy arm of government. So we set the rules and regulations around food, farming and agriculture. And then underneath us we've got a whole bunch of arm's length bodies, but there's five particular arm's length bodies which are the largest ones essentially, that sit underneath DEFRA and have the same IT department essentially. So in my role I'm not just looking purely at DEFRA, I'm also looking at the five arms length bodies underneath. So it's about 37,000 employees across those different organizations.

Mark Smith: 9:54
Incredible. And so when you say the policies, does this go into the area of ESG and sustainability?

Emma Claire Shaw: 10:02
Yeah, it does. Yeah, so different parts of that. Yeah, they fall across different arm's length bodies, but yeah, it does cover all of that. Yeah, so under our well. Actually I'm not going to list them off because I'll definitely forget one and then I'll be struggling to remember it, but we'll talk about a few of them when we talk about some of the apps we've been doing.

Mark Smith: 10:19
Yeah, awesome, awesome. And so then tell me about how you first came across the Power Platform.

Emma Claire Shaw: 10:55
Well, first came across it in my previous role in Defra. So I mean, I've always been a bit of a geek, got the internet early. My mum worked in IT and spent my teens on MSN Messenger. Then went to uni, studied what I was good at at the time, which was English and the thing I was interested in, and I had this idea that I wanted to work in advertising, had a kind of madman type image of working in advertising. But then the agency I ended up working at kind of brought those two parts of my life together.

Emma Claire Shaw: 11:25
So we dealt mostly with B2B technology marketing. So Microsoft were one of our clients, toshiba, emc, and it was at that time when everything was about the cloud. So the early noughties everything we were doing was about the cloud. And then did a little sidestep into working as a mobile strategy consultant around the dawn of the first iPhone. So the guy had been working for started a new company, um, developing enterprise mobile applications and then sort of dabbled with creating our own off-the-shelf kind of forms based applications. So that was kind of my first interest in that sort of concept, I suppose, of of low code, of being able to kind of spin up apps without having to sit writing all of the code for it, which, with some of those enterprise mobile apps that we were building at the beginning there they were big projects and there was a lot to do and particularly like the integration, was getting really, really messy. So then I kind of got tired of working on some of the apps, some of the clients we were working with, and started to look around for my next opportunity and saw this role at Defra, working as a tech innovation consultant, which kind of brought together two parts of my life really that the technology side, the geekery side, the consultancy side that I've been developing in that work in the mobile technology area and the environment, which is something that I've always been interested in. So that role was really about looking at new technology that Defra might be able to use to better achieve its goals and in that role I focused on mobile tech but also focused on our 365 rollout, which was in its infancy. So my role on that program of work was essentially looking at the 365 product and looking at all the stuff coming along, the roadmap that we might want to use and how we might want to use it, so matching the kind of business requirements that we had against the tech that was there, and so I heard about this thing called Power Apps in that job and it called me back to my forms-based mobile app days could see some examples of things we might be able to use it for in Defra.

Emma Claire Shaw: 13:31
So both from that kind of citizen dev side and from our kind of IT project delivery side. So we ran a proof of concept from both sides. So some guys in our fleet team had a go at building their own apps for essentially keeping a log of our fleet vehicles, making that so people in our um who have those fleet vehicles could easily go and see what the status was and that kind of thing. It was very straightforward one. And then we had a look at an it project which had recently fallen over in its delivery for our port inspectors. So guys out there having a look to see if they especially inspecting shipping containers there's so many interesting things that our arms length bodies do honestly, mark the breadth of the things that we do is just crazy. So these port inspectors they work at some of the biggest ports in the uk and their job is in spot checking shipping containers to make sure people aren't shipping out illegal waste or things that have been stolen, which sometimes is the case. So sometimes they'll find a sports car packed behind loads of rubbish to hide it on its way out, but often what they find is just loads of waste that should have been recycled, being shipped out of the country. So they were working with a clipboard and paper in the rain in a port, so we built them a power app to do it instead.

Emma Claire Shaw: 14:49
Both of those proof of concepts were really successful.

Emma Claire Shaw: 14:52
Everybody thought they were great. They did exactly what they needed to do, so I made some recommendations on the next step. So my job in that consultancy role was to say shall we do it? And the answer was yes, and I made some recommendations around getting some strategy around it, perhaps bringing someone in to lead it, and then, three years later, my job came up, because that's how long it takes in government to get people to change. And, yeah, I've now been doing the job for three years and I absolutely love it. It's been very challenging and I think, particularly from where we started from in terms of our adoption, there weren't that many organizations we could copy in terms of what they were doing. Um, so it's been challenging and busy, but it's such an interesting technology area and I think, especially for government. It's just made such a huge impact for us in such a short period of time and I can't imagine any other technology doing the same thing. Um, so you asked me how I came across it. You've had the whole story now it's awesome.

Mark Smith: 15:47
It's awesome. So a couple couple of things I want to unpack.

Emma Claire Shaw: 15:50
You talked about um 365 and I assume you're talking about microsoft 365 rather than dynamics 365 I am talking about microsoft 365, but I always still want to say office 365, even though it's been microsoft 365 for so long totally, totally, totally.

Mark Smith: 16:04
No, that's cool. Um, interesting, around that app around the shipping containers. I've been involved in building one for all the ports in Australia for shipping, which was around incoming containers to track the evidence collection for illegal contraband coming in in the shipping containers, and we first built the app for all air cargo coming into the country and then we moved on to shipping containers and so I assume they have these at the port, but they would have X-ray machines that can X-ray a full container at a time, right, and the way people would hide stuff was just mind-blowing. It's mad, isn't it? You know, like false floors in the containers and you know double-lined walls packed with tobacco I mean, tobacco is still a massive kind of you know to get around the tariffs and things associated with it Steroids, all sorts of things, of course, and of course all the drugs and stuff that would be shipped in that way as well. So I love that part of the job where it's such intriguing field-related stuff.

Mark Smith: 17:15
And then you know you take a clipboard process and that's what I call them, and I found you know the early days of the Power Platform that clipboard processes were the easiest low-hanging fruit to digitize, right, and you got so many more benefits with a clipboard. Processes were the easiest low-hanging fruit to digitize right. And you got so many more benefits with the clipboard process in that you got now the authenticated user right, so you knew who it was, you got the timestamp of when it was done and, if you had GPS enabled, you got a very clear where was it done and all that telemetry data can really inform how things change. You know and in my mind I was thinking of Virgin Atlantic while I was in the UK was doing this as well for flight crew and stuff, and it just adds a whole level of rigor to any type of checklist type processes.

Mark Smith: 18:02
You know, another one that came to mind I was involved in was, you know, when you walk onto the aircraft through the air bridge, well, all of those need inspecting, and that used to be a paper-based process. It was always independent inspector. It would take ages to do. Photos needed to be captured. You know recommendations, repairs, compliance things, and moving that to digital just sped everything up. You know you could have an inspection done and a work order created on the same day, which that used to be like six weeks later yeah after the inspection was done.

Emma Claire Shaw: 18:36
So it definitely changes things a lot yeah, and it's interesting you mentioned that one because we did something similar for dhl, which is a logistics company in the uk, for the part of their delivery process and it like in the mobile application developer that I was working for, and thinking back now you know that development probably took six to nine months and cost them, you know, probably over a hundred thousand pounds to have that app delivered. But now you could build something like that in, I don't know, probably a week and a half. Yeah crazy.

Mark Smith: 19:06
Right using right Using the platform or a similar product.

Emma Claire Shaw: 19:08
So yeah, it is crazy We've come such a long way. It's really exciting.

Mark Smith: 19:13
So, on the Power Platform, across the various things that you've built, are you using the full suite Like? Do you use Power BI? Do you use Power Automate, power Apps, power Pages? Are you using any of the AI-type tooling that's available and I'm talking about the AI tooling that was pre-Copilot, so, ai Builder, for example, how broad is your implementation?

Emma Claire Shaw: 19:38
So we've got Apps, automate and BI, all three very heavily in use, so I can go into some of the stats around that in a sec. But um, co-pilot no. Ai builder no, um, and power pages no, not yet. So power pages falls down on some of the standards that we have in the government digital service for delivering public-facing websites, so at the moment our developers won't go near it.

Mark Smith: 20:13
As? In what standard does it fall down? Is it like a usability standards?

Emma Claire Shaw: 20:17
So it's not usability standards, it's to do with development languages. I'd have to go back to my email and see what the problem with it was, but we have revisited it recently and it was a hard no that I got. But I know that some other government departments are using it.

Mark Smith: 20:32
See around the world massive amount of government departments are using it. In New Zealand. We've just launched a company, a four-year project and all our passport processing application 100% online, all through PowerPages. So it's for 5 million citizens and plus all visa applications all done through PowerPages.

Emma Claire Shaw: 20:54
Wow, yeah, I'm sure it's something that we will revisit, but for now we're not going there.

Mark Smith: 21:00
Interesting Just on the Pages side. Have you discussed it with Microsoft directly?

Emma Claire Shaw: 21:07
Good question. I'll have to go back and try and recall from six months ago.

Mark Smith: 21:11
Because that is something that they would really proactively want to engage with.

Emma Claire Shaw: 21:17
Yeah.

Mark Smith: 21:18
Around, particularly that you're a government agency and therefore you're probably representative of every government agency in the UK, and it's about getting that level of engagement in Microsoft that could really tell you where it was on the roadmap to address or if it's not going to be addressed at all. And so therefore, really, rather than just doing the self-discovery, I think sometimes it's good to have, like I had a situation where I needed to get a data sovereignty issue sorted out and this is eight years ago, so a long time ago when it wasn't as transparent as what it is now but ultimately I had the CTO of Microsoft engage with the CTO of the organization I was working for and there was a legal agreement drawn around that the data would never leave. In this case, the Australian data centers would never move across to, let's say, singapore or Hong Kong or any of the other kind of data center locations at all. But they'll do that type of one-to-one type engagement with you.

Emma Claire Shaw: 22:28
Oh, that's a good shout. I think that's a good idea. Yeah, I'll get the right people together our side and give them a shout. No, we do get gold standard service off Microsoft, don't worry. Yeah, very good, very good.

Mark Smith: 22:42
So it's interesting, you say you can't get the governance around AI Builder, because AI Builder is totally different than co-pilot. Right, it's in a different world in that it's what I'd call the old school machine learning, real way of doing AI, rather than generative AI. And so therefore, you know, governance is a lot more robust, I suppose, than what you get with generative at the moment.

Emma Claire Shaw: 23:05
Although something else you should know about DefraMark is that our data is not in great shape, not in great shape at all. We're working on it and you know there's there's lots of projects where we're working to to tidy it up and sort it out, and you know, get an awful lot of it into dataverse now, nice.

Emma Claire Shaw: 23:22
but you know those clipboard processes, we've still got some. We've still got loads of I mean hundreds of PDF forms that the public have to download off, govuk and fill out and post into us. It's just, it is madness, it is madness. But you know we've got so much to do and hardly any money to do it with. So and that's you know, not that every project on the Power Platform is cheap, but just having an agreed architecture and an agreed approach for how we now approach these problems is transformational for us.

Mark Smith: 23:56
Yeah, tell us about your stats. What stats have you got?

Emma Claire Shaw: 24:01
So I mentioned how many users we've got. So we've got 37,000 users, so to date we've now got about 60. It delivered apps on sitting on power apps um, so obviously some of those are part of you know one enterprise solution, but, yeah, about 60. And then we've got over 200 now citizen developed apps that are in regular use. So the citizen developed side is is huge, um, and we're seeing about so for the last, over the last year, uh, 200 growth in the number of apps on the tenancy and about 350 growth in the number of flows. Um, so power automate the growth in power automates been massive this year. That's incredible. Yeah, so it's, but it's. We're kind of a victim of our own success now because it's grown so quickly. So we've got a lot of challenges as well, but it's great how quickly the adoption is happening as well, because it is really solving a lot of big problems for us.

Mark Smith: 25:02
Yeah, so those automations, are they coming more from the citizen dev side of the organization or more from your?

Emma Claire Shaw: 25:13
It's a mix. It's a mix, I'd say. If I was to make up a number based on what I think is happening, it's probably like 25% of them on the IT project side and 75% on the staff citizen developers um.

Mark Smith: 25:41
Have you looked at all? Um? The powercat team within microsoft released a tool called the, the business value kit, and allows you to install it in on your tenant and it allows you to report on the roi of every automation, every app that you have in your business.

Emma Claire Shaw: 25:56
No, I haven't seen this. So benefits is my biggest challenge. Pulling together benefits, you know what value are we really delivering on? I'm very intrigued as to how it does that, because we're trying to build something or we have been trying to build something that does that for us.

Mark Smith: 26:18
So it does a bunch of things it like engages with the creator of the app or automation and it will do a little survey questionnaire to them that's what I was going to do.

Mark Smith: 26:26
That's what I'm building, mark yeah, there you go, so you might want to go and take a look at that. Um, I am going to, because that what I've noticed in organizations is that one of the biggest problems they run into, as you talk about being a victim of your own success, is that you build some great stuff. And I was just talking with a company while I was in Vegas and they've got 70,000 employees and they have built. He showed me the apps on his phone and I was like man, these are amazing, because I have a rule that if I look at an app and I can tell it's a power app, you've failed. Right, the UX and UI you've failed. If I can tell it's a power app, I couldn't tell. I had to ask him are these power apps? He was like yeah. I said man, these are amazing. And I said so, your premium license, I take it right across the org. He goes no, we don't have any. And he goes.

Mark Smith: 27:23
The problem is the executives don't want to give me money because what we've done has been so successful that they're like why do you need a pay for licensing as well? This is amazing, and what I've found is that if you're going to keep going to executives to get budget to do something. They want to see numbers, right, they want to see and why. I think what Microsoft has done with releasing particularly the Power team, which is, you know, the Power team is, or the Power Cat team is designed to help Microsoft's big customers with their adoption of the technology. So they're not paid, they're not about driving license sales, although that is ultimately perhaps a byproduct.

Mark Smith: 28:01
So these kits that they put out are free and allow you to, and it was once again a request from customers to really understand what was the true value. It's fine to look at total economic impact reports that are done by Forrester and things like that, but that's those companies, right. People go what is our company? What's the impact in our business? And so this gives you that and you imagine if, every month, you could have a report that says this has been the impact on the business that we have had. When you go to executives with those reports, all of a sudden they're like it's a different conversation, right, because you're proving the value you're generating.

Emma Claire Shaw: 28:38
Absolutely, and with Power Automate you should be able to make that data really accurate because you can say every time this flow runs it's saved half an hour of someone's time. So you should be able to roll that data up. So I've got a bit of a competition internally because we've got a team that look after. We have a UI path for desktop automation.

Mark Smith: 28:57
Yeah, because we've got a team that look after we have a UI path for desktop automation.

Emma Claire Shaw: 29:00
Yeah, everyone makes mistakes right from time to time. They've got a Power BI dashboard that displays live data on how much time their robots are saving and how much money their robots are saving Defra and they've been going for three years, so we're into the millions now of pounds and they've just got it ticking over and we've just just at the moment, every.

Emma Claire Shaw: 29:19
All of our benefits are qualitative and not quantitative um and that's, yeah, we really need to start getting some harder, cold hard numbers, especially. You know I don't know how much you're aware of the political situation in the uk at the moment our new government have found a big hole in our finances so we've got a lot of pressure on central government now to do things cheaper and prove the value of every penny we're spending, and I know it's really valuable, but I need the numbers. So I'm definitely that's my first job for tomorrow morning, mark to look into that. Thank you.

Mark Smith: 29:53
Check it out, because I think that if it becomes part of just the muscle of the organization to produce these reports, one you're going to find a lot of success stories, because one of the things it does as well is captures the individual successes around it, so it gets them to go. Hey, can you give us your feedback? Tell us why you think this is amazing? And so you're getting all this constant? You know, bob said this, suzy said this, frank said this, and so to go with that, as you say, qualitative data, having that though, the story that it can tell with it as well, I think it's a very smart bit of tooling to have you know on your tenant yeah, my hopes up.

Emma Claire Shaw: 30:35
I hope it lives up to the dream well, you can tell me.

Mark Smith: 30:38
You can tell me, like, as a, I'd love to see how it goes um. And, by the way, it is only like four weeks old, so it is brand new okay.

Emma Claire Shaw: 30:48
Yeah, I'm surprised. No one in my team is aware of it because we go to the um, the monthly meetings on the toolkit, the PowerCat meeting, so I'm surprised it's not come up.

Mark Smith: 30:58
Yeah, I'm surprised because where I came across it was LinkedIn and the individual on the PowerCat team published it on LinkedIn and the funny thing is, when I traced it all the way through to get the download assets, which I just did, maybe last week, it actually goes to a site for Ignite 2024, which is not till December.

Mark Smith: 31:21
Oh, okay, and that's where it was published there. So they may be going to make a big song and dance in December about it. Maybe or November, I can't remember exactly when Ignite is, but it was. Yeah, it was funny that it was on the Ignite site is where these assets were. They weren't normally. In fact, if you go to the PowerCat website, you don't actually see it listed in one of the kits. So it is definitely fresh and I've lined up to do a couple of podcasts with the creators of it, okay. So yeah, to get more exposure. Yeah, to get more, more exposure, but I I do think that it's going to be a become a powerful tool for organizations to really prove the value that they're creating in a way that executives won't argue with right, because it's based on your dollars and cents, like that your organization, you know, uses. So therefore, you, it would stand up with a cfo, for example. It wouldn't be, like, you know, fictitious numbers.

Emma Claire Shaw: 32:18
Yeah, absolutely.

Mark Smith: 32:20
The best app in your mind that you've been involved in and that you're built for, most proud of. What would that be Like? What was the workload it was addressing? What was it doing?

Emma Claire Shaw: 32:29
Well. So I don't actually get involved in the delivery of these apps, so my job is very much about managing the product, the governance around the product and what everybody's doing. But I'll tell you about some of the interesting apps that we've been. I'll give you a couple of examples of some of the interesting things that we've been working on and things that um feel like quite cool uses of it. So one I said to come back to fishing, um.

Emma Claire Shaw: 32:53
So one of the first power apps that we went live with um was for Environment Agency. So that's one of those five arm's length bodies, so they're actually bigger than Cordefra. It's about 10,000 people and one of their responsibilities is around maintaining the health of our rivers. So anybody fishing in the rivers in England needs to have a rod license in order to do that, and we have inspectors out in the field who go out and go up to those people by the riverside and check that they've got a license. So previously unfortunately not even a clipboard process because they'd need to have all that customer data on them the process was that they would see if the person has the angler has a license and then call up our contact center if they haven't got anything on them to check their details or check that it's still valid if the card's out of date or whatever. So their inspector would go away from the angler, call the contact center, check up on the anglers details and then go back to the angler, give them a fine if they need to. Um, so really simple use case. We've now got, uh, moved that data into somewhere where we can ingest it properly. We've then got the power app that the inspectors have out on the riverside, and they can quickly look on the app now by the river to see if the angler's license is up to date. So huge increase in efficiencies Only one person involved in that process. Now the biggest challenge with that one, though, is the offline working. So we still haven't solved that one, wow, but I think close to getting it sorted now. So sometimes they're out of signal, obviously, so that one's been quite a good one for us. Another I mean this is probably the biggest one, or one of the biggest ones, that we're delivering at the moment, or have just gone live with part of it, but it's going to be an ongoing project.

Emma Claire Shaw: 34:37
So natural england is another one of our arm's length bodies, and so natural england's responsible for protecting and restoring the natural environment. So they manage a number of licensing schemes around sustainable development. So, like if you had a badger set in your garden and you wanted to extend your house over where that badger set was, you'd need a license to ensure that you were doing it with minimal harm. And historically those were one of those lovely PDF paper-based processes. So you'd print your form off, you'd fill out your form, you'd post it into Natural England and then someone in Natural England's office would take that data and punch it into essentially a citizen-developed solution which would either be a spreadsheet or an access database. So they were all very manual, very decentralized processes and there's loads of these different sorts of licenses that people have licensing schemes for different things and they're all managed by different teams. So we'd have different customer databases in different excel sheets and access databases, and some of these spreadsheets and access databases are keeping track of significant income streams.

Emma Claire Shaw: 35:42
I mean like, yeah, into the millions of pounds for natural england, yeah, yeah, um, so really been left by the wayside for far too long.

Emma Claire Shaw: 35:51
So we've now got a large program of work delivering a dataverse and model driven app solution to take the place of these existing paper-based solutions.

Emma Claire Shaw: 36:00
So they've started with some of the biggest ones and then they'll be moving on and some of the smaller ones over time. So there's a huge runway now of licensing schemes to come on. So it's um in the process of being launched with three of our development schemes and then more those will be over time. But essentially where the platform has been really beneficial for us there is it's made it really easy to consolidate that data and bring it into one place and drive efficiencies in that delivery. So that thing we were talking about earlier, I guess it's kind of cookie cutter now because we know how we're going to do the case management and the customer management and we can build things on top of it. So we've done the hard work and and we can now expand it and I think that's going forward where the real sweet spot's going to be for defra, because across core defra and the five arms length bodies there's lots of use cases that are very similar and so we can do more reuse as we move on.

Mark Smith: 36:56
Brilliant, brilliant.

Mark Smith: 36:58
I see we're well over time, so we're going to need to wrap.

Mark Smith: 37:04
It was interesting, as in the offline comment that you made, because eight years ago Build a Solution for Main Roads in Western Australia and they are one state government right in WA.

Mark Smith: 37:19
That one state, the geographic size of it is 11 times the size of the United Kingdom, so it's large but a dirt right. And we had to provide offline mode for all their road workers so they'd go out and inspect the roads with ArcGIS integration and find defects in the roads where there was absolutely no mobile coverage for the entire day. And so, yeah, we solved that offline problem eight, nine years ago and they're road worker trucks so they'd be able to go along the road Because the mapping was in real time. They'd be able to point to an area and say, okay, this is a pothole, and then it would say, basically draw how large it was, and then behind the scenes it would automatically create a work order for that and then when the truck went back to the depot, at the end of the day they would just drop their toughened devices in and it would join the network and sync all that data back into the platform at that point. So it should be a solvable problem for you. The offline access.

Emma Claire Shaw: 38:20
Yeah, I think there was just a lot of nervousness about all the customer data being on people's devices, but I'm sure oh, so the device is fully locked down.

Mark Smith: 38:28
So you know you put BitLocker on, you make sure that they have the password even to run the operating system type thing. So fully and like that encryption is, you won't be. You know it takes somebody 10 years to crack the encryption on that type of thing, at a minimum. So you're not going to lose the data anytime soon, unless supercomputers come out. You know so you'll be pretty safe.

Mark Smith: 38:53
Yeah, Anyhow, that's all I've got time for Emma. It's been so good. It's been so easy to talk to you as well, which I've really enjoyed. Thank you for everything you've shared today.

Emma Claire Shaw: 39:05
Not at all. Really nice to meet you, mark, and I'll see you hopefully in person next time.

Mark Smith: 39:11
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.