Empowering Digital Transformation: Georgia Tsoraklidou's Journey with Power Platform

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 the power platform success at SLB or SlumberJ, particularly highlighting the usage in HR, health and safety applications. Today's guest is from Houston, texas in the United States. She works at SLB as the HR digital cell lead. She speaks Greek, english, russian and is currently learning to speak Spanish Amazing. She's interested in AI, machine learning and adoption of O365 tools for business development and operation digitization. She's also recognized by Microsoft as a Microsoft Power Apps champion since 2001. You can find links to her bio, social media and the like in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, georgia.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 1:38
Hi, mark, thank you so much. That's a very, very nice introduction. Thank you for that.

Mark Smith: 1:45
Excellent, excellent. I can't believe how many languages you know.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 1:48
I know I can say hi in every single language if you want. Can you really? Every single language we want? Can you really? Oh, yes, I can say ya, which is in Greek, hi in English, stradivista, which is in Russian, and hola in Spanish.

Mark Smith: 2:04
Yeah, Valid, valid, valid. So tell us a bit about food, family and fun. What do they mean to you?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 2:13
Well, family is very important to me. They all live back in Greece, so I travel a lot to see them. I made a promise when I left that I will always go back at least once a year, and I have kept my promise for seven years in a row, so that's a good track there.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 2:34
Food I'm a foodie, for sure. I like to try different tastes. So I risk definitely, and lately I have raised my spice level a little bit because I couldn't take spicy at all. So now at least I can do mild or medium on that aspect. And on hobbies, I mean, I try a lot of things, but the one that I love the most is traveling. I love to go to different countries, meet different cultures, people from there, learn about their cultures, their life and just go around, taste food as well locally. So yeah, that's my passion, I think traveling.

Mark Smith: 3:20
I love it. What's your favorite country? If you could only choose one country to live for the rest of your life, where would it be?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 3:26
Oh, don't make that question. Greece I can't say no to that. I'm very tired there. Yes, yes, yes, For vacation.

Mark Smith: 3:37
Yes, I know what you mean. I would say New Zealand would be my choice because I live here now, but Italy is definitely my number one second country. Mediterranean in general is very nice, and then I'd follow that with Portugal. But here's the thing I have never been to Greece. Here's the thing I invite you to come. Anytime you have to tell me and we can go. Oh, I'd love to go to Greece, as in, it's definitely. Yeah, it's one of my. My wife's been.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 4:07
She went without me and I have not been there oh, she's been without you while you were together or before.

Mark Smith: 4:14
Yes, yes, while we were together, like I think, she went there because I had to go on a work trip to China for Microsoft and she had family coming and they decided this is when we're living in London, and so she went to Greece and I still have not been.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 4:29
Oh, such a pity you need to go. You should go. Take your wife this time, don't hold a grudge.

Mark Smith: 4:35
Yes, yes, yes, maybe next year, maybe next year. I'm planning on going to live in Italy for a month next year so I can do a couple of conferences, and I've had two children now, so I'll be taking a four-year-old and a two-year-old to Italy, which for a month I think it'll be awesome, maybe six weeks. My wife just said maybe six weeks rather than a month, and so we're planning on probably going to Greece as part of that.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 4:59
Oh, that's awesome. Well, if you want recommendations, just send me over a message.

Mark Smith: 5:13
Yeah, totally, totally. Now let's talk a bit about how you got into tech before we talk about in detail about SLB, because SLB is one of the poster childs for Microsoft and the use of the Power Platform. Alan, who's on your team, I've had on the podcast before and, as we discussed off air, I just met him again in person a couple of weeks ago at the Power Platform Conference in a community conference in Vegas. But tell me about how did you first get exposed to the Power Platform? What was that journey for you?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 5:40
That's an interesting journey. Actually, I was doing my master's in Scotland. It was IT in oil and gas, and obviously they don't teach you Power Platform because it was quite new. It was 2017 when I was doing it. Teach you Power Platform because it was quite new. It was 2017 when I was doing it. So they teach you, like Java, all that kind of Python, the pro code.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 6:06
So when I was trying to get a job, obviously nobody was telling me anything about Power Platform and I never heard of it. So I went to the interview for an internship in SLB and that was with Alan the interview. So I go to the interview, we start, we discuss all kinds of things, and then he asked me have you heard of Power Platform or Power BI or Power Apps? And I was like that doesn't sound familiar, but that's a thought in my mind. I'm like, ok, what's the closest I can think of? And I said, well, are these Microsoft tools? Because I only know PowerPoint. Seriously, I said that and I was like, okay, he obviously smiled, laughed and he explained to me what are Power Apps and Power BI and that I don't really need to know in order to start using them and build something on my own. So he did explain that even on the interview.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 7:01
Such a great guy, alan, yeah, and that's how I started, because when I left that interview it was like there is no way he's hiring me for an IT internship for knowing PowerPoint. But in the end the next day I received my email saying that you start on the 3rd of September. I was like, okay, it didn't work out saying the truth or being funny about it and not knowing anything about Power Platform. That's how I started. Alan taught me for a few weeks?

Mark Smith: 7:32
Wow, that's amazing. So tell me, how did you get your first? What was the first project then that you worked on?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 7:40
So initially he was giving me very small tasks so I can get to learn the power-ups, mainly in the beginning. So he was telling me oh, I can't do this. Obviously he could, but he was just giving it saying I can't do this. Can you find out how that can be done? It was like a gallery with images and stuff like that. So it was simple things.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 8:01
Now that I'm thinking about it, but back then to me it was big. So I was going online, I was Googling. Obviously, when I had to go back and tell him I couldn't find anything, I had to go back and tell him I researched everything. I couldn't go back and just say I couldn't do it within an hour, for example. So I researched everything on Google and obviously lots of YouTube videos that I was watching with our friends, obviously, since then. So, yeah, that's how little things galleries, buttons here and there to figure out how to build things.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 8:36
And then the first app I did was an emergency response app for HSE though I was not working for HSE back then yet and it was a huge application that Alan gave it to me to do it because he had done something in the past for them with a software, the SharePoint site. But he said now we have to do it in Power Apps since we have a better platform, and that's how I got into doing it. Obviously he was checking on me and I was asking questions to Alan, but it was solely me doing that application for three months. It took me a while, but it was a huge application to start with and is being used up to today. I think it got a revamp last year because it's been a while, but yeah, it's being used still.

Mark Smith: 9:23
That's so cool. That's so cool. So tell us a bit about SLB. I'm so used to calling it Slumber. Day, Slumber Day yes, but tell me, like, how big is this company, what's the industry it operates in, what's its global distribution?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 9:39
So we are a company in the energy industry. We provide services, software, to other energy companies. We are 111,000 employees worldwide, spread around 115 countries. So the spread is quite huge and we do have employees from 200 different nationalities. So even the diversity is a challenge that we embrace, I would say.

Mark Smith: 10:07
That's amazing. That's amazing. That's quite a geography spread and a very large company. Now can you give me any stats around how much of the adoption level of the Power Platform Like? Last time I talked to Alan, he gave me numbers around the number of automations, the number of apps you have running, the number of active monthly users. Do you have any of those type of data points now, Because I think it's six years ago.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 10:33
Well, I was trying to get those earlier, but what I know is that we have at least around 40,000 applications today. Obviously, some of them are for productivity purposes within a team. Other are much larger applications that are being used in a wider audience, and some of them might be used even throughout SLB from all employees. So automations I'm sure they reach the some hundred thousands as well, I would say, but I do not have all the numbers, unfortunately, because I couldn't see the COE kit.

Mark Smith: 11:13
Okay, okay, that's very interesting. Tell me about agents, and I'm not talking about AI agents, I'm talking about SLB agents. This is something that Alan created. Yes, what is an agent, what does it mean and why is it important?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 11:28
So Alan started this and I was his guinea pig, as he says in most of his presentations. So he started this kind of program the special agents in SLB. He wanted to clone himself so he doesn't have to get all the requests and do all these applications or analytics on his own, but have other people that can do it at the level he can. Obviously we cannot reach Alan's level, but we can be good enough to be special agents under him in the business. So he tried to clone himself and put us in the business, help out in the different departments and business units in the company, so we sit inside the business and we can find what are their pain points easier in that way.

Mark Smith: 12:21
so that was his plan and, uh, I think he has quite a few now wow, so we're talking about, I take it it's based on, like james bond right agent, yeah, 007. Um, who's got 007 in the business? Do you know?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 12:37
Nobody, he's not giving it to anyone.

Mark Smith: 12:42
License to kill. Eh, no, one's got that one, and so what's your agent number?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 12:47
It's 001, just because I'm the first one Wow.

Mark Smith: 12:50
Yes, I know, that is so. So, epic, that's so, epic, I'm the baseline. I find it interesting I've seen even people leave SLB and go into Microsoft and yet still their LinkedIn profile shows their agent number. Yes, that is so cool, that is so cool.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 13:09
I believe Alan created like a little community, which is it's always nice to have.

Mark Smith: 13:17
So yeah, tell us a bit more about the concept around it. So you're saying that agents then get deployed across the business into various business units to understand their challenges and then produce solutions for them?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 13:29
yeah, that's correct, and but alan has specific traits, personality traits that he's looking in a person before he can name them an agent. So not everyone can become an agent. He calls them the three H's being hungry to learn, humble, stay humble, and the other one I always forget. So humility, hungriness to learn and hungriness to teach, so you. And hungerness to teach, so you need to be hungry to teach others.

Mark Smith: 14:01
I love that. I love that. So do you have a regular cadence where you get together and do a Teams call with all the other agents? Do you have kind of like check-ins, like showcase what you're doing in your part of the organization and how does that work?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 14:18
So we used to have those for sure. Now we do get some get togethers as well, because most of us at the moment we are in Houston, which is very interesting aspect as well. So we do get the get togethers here in Houston, which is much nicer because we can go out, have drink uh and discuss uh as well and have fun. But yeah, you're right, we try to have some get together, some discussions. I might just being another person out of nowhere, just to discuss things, uh, without having to have all the people together nice and um.

Mark Smith: 14:54
My other thought there is do you do training on purpose, like do you are various agents running their own training programs as in to train other people inside SLB?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 15:06
Yes, while I was in HSC I started that mini program where I wanted to train HSC people in using Power Platform, because I was just me in HSC so I could solve a handful of problems at once in a year. So I wanted to teach others how to do even maybe smaller applications or smaller Power BIs or smaller automations to solve their country-specific issues. Because we are across many countries and we call them geo is a cluster of countries. So if I could get some help in solving related geo unit issues without me touching the problem, then that would be very productive and useful for us because then they could do a poc in a specific geo unit and then we could take it and make it global at the headquarters. So, yes, I tried to train around 40 people HSE professionals, not IT professionals.

Mark Smith: 16:06
Yes, yes, yes, okay, that's amazing. That's amazing. Tell us about the biggest app that you've built or been involved in building that's had a massive impact.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 16:17
That was a COVID-19 application. It was called COVID-19 Slumbers Are Safe application. Back then, because I was working for HSE, we had to come up with something, a solution. It wasn't supposed to be just an app but in general, a solution that would help us distribute and communicate information to our employees that will be the source of truth for COVID-19.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 16:44
Because, you know, in the beginning especially, we didn't know much about the pandemic, so there was a lot of misinformation out there. So our leaders decided that we want to have one place where our employees can go and see this is approved because this has been gone through our professionals in the health and safety department and they have vetted it in a way. So these are the correct information you should get. So we started, even in January. Back that year, if you remember, the pandemic was announced in March back that year. If you remember, the pandemic was announced in March, but we started in January because we already had operations that were affected in Asia, in China. So most of the information that we had were coming from that region, but we had employees that didn't know about it in the US, for example. Right, yes.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 17:38
So we started in January and we built that application at the end of January. Within a day we just launched it and within a day it had 6,000 employees accessing it right from the get-go and I think by the end of pandemic we had more than 50,000 employees that had accessed the app multiple times.

Mark Smith: 18:38
Wow, that's incredible. That's incredible, An amazing use case. I noticed that around the world. I think the Power Platform really took off in the pandemic time because so many organizations are building solutions like this. Now that you're in HR, what's your typical use cases that you're building for?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 18:58
HR. What's your typical use cases that you're building for? Hr has a lot of analytics, data analytics, so I'm using lots of Power BI with my team right now, rather than Power Apps. So lots of Power BI, lots of automations as well, in order to get some data from systems that we don't usually have connectors for. So analytics is around.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 19:18
You know, you asked me about how many employees we had, or that, the spread across the countries, these, these are kind of things that, uh, I can look into and we deep dive in those things to find out, uh, maybe, how many employees, how much attrition we have in a specific region, how we can address that, what is the reason people are living, or how many acquisitions, how many people we have acquired throughout the years, what's the trend all these kind of of things we analyze in hr. And from apps perspective, we do have some applications. The latest one I am working on and well, it's live, but we're still working on enhancing it is talent moves, because obviously you, with the thing and organization that's huge you have a lot of moves of employees from one place to another, from one position to another, from one department to another. That company needs to track those and and have the ability to find the right talent for the right position and verify vice versa. So that's the latest application.

Mark Smith: 20:26
So what does that app do? Is it purely an app where people can list their skills, et cetera, and then you use it as a hiring manager chooses another area. What are you using it for?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 20:47
No, not really. So this application is mostly in slb. We don't do things standard way, if you want, never, uh. So we don't post a position for employees to say I want this position, or employees don't really have to tell us every skill they have. We do have a platform where they can say, oh, this is what I would like to do in the future and kind of plan it. But we don't always have to stick to that plan as long as we put them in a path for development. So we have talent managers who look into the employee profile. So every employee has assigned a talent manager and then they work it out so they can see the positions that become available. They can see the employees that are available and how they match towards those positions. And marriage is like a marriage of a position with an employee.

Mark Smith: 21:37
That's so cool. I've never come across a concept of an organization having talent management internally, and I can see how that would benefit a business so so well to have that kind of thinking. Does that mean people move around much in their roles?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 21:53
Yes, definitely that's cool, exactly what it means. I mean, I am seven years now in the company and I already moved two times. Well, if you count, my internship is three, because I started as an intern in scotland in geo unit called eur europe, um, and then I moved to headquarters agency uh, that was one move. And then I moved to hr headquarters hr. So that's second move. And then I moved to HR headquarters HR. So that's second move, and I'm an employee.

Mark Smith: 22:23
Wow those different countries as well yes, that was different countries.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 22:27
I moved from Scotland to London and then from London to Houston wow, that's incredible.

Mark Smith: 22:33
So so for SLB, is London headquarters, is that head office?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 22:37
we do have four head offices. Um, okay, we have London, we have Paris, we have Houston and Hague, the Hague wow, wow, um any desire to move to Paris, I would love to, just to experience it, but it's super expensive. Yes, yes, yes, yes, same as London, um, but yeah, I, I wouldn't mind. Maybe a short assignment, why not?

Mark Smith: 23:04
have you? Have you seen the Netflix series Emily in Paris? I did, yes, yeah, that's. That's what makes me want to go back to Paris. I'm just like it's such a cool city. It's such a cool city, it's a very cool city. I yeah, but I feel that to be successful in Paris, you must speak French.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 23:22
Which is a pain point, because I don't and. I don't like it, I find it very difficult.

Mark Smith: 23:29
Why are you learning Spanish at the moment?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 23:32
That's another funny story. It was during COVID, when I started learning Spanish and the language school that I was using in Greece to learn English. They were doing those virtual lessons for their students and I was like, okay, why not? I know the people, I know they are a good school, they have good teachers. So I signed up for class and they were offering specific languages and from those I was like I did Russian, I know Russian, I'm done with Russian. So the next one that I it seemed logical to me was Spanish. Uh, cause, they had French, but I cannot do French for no reason. And then they had Turkish. I was like, okay, I don't really like them that much, the language.

Mark Smith: 24:22
I'm not going to get into that.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 24:23
And then it was Italian and Spanish, so I was between the two and just went with Spanish.

Mark Smith: 24:30
Nice, nice. I spent two weeks two different weeks, not together in a Spanish language school in Spain, but it was to teach them English.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 24:42
Oh, amazing.

Mark Smith: 24:44
Yeah. So, as people had gone through like a full immersion Spanish sorry, english training program. So they're like companies like Diageo, where you know they're a global company, all business is done in English. Yet these were part, and so they were often executives and stuff that needed to feel comfortable speaking in English.

Mark Smith: 25:04
And so for this, two weeks in two different locations in Spain and one was like a restored monastery, which was amazing. Another one was a castle it was just such a cool venue to do this all around Madrid or outside Madrid, and what happened is they just needed to be able to have a conversation for one hour in English where they weren't allowed to speak any Spanish. And this was after they had done all their let's say, 12 months of English training. And so I just had to sit down and have a chat for an hour and at the end of that hour then another student would come along and would move out by the pool, maybe, and have a chat for an hour, and at the end of that hour then another student would come along and would move out by the pool, maybe, and have a swim in the pool while we just converse.

Mark Smith: 25:44
But the number one rule no Spanish was allowed to be spoken at all, and so it was so cool because you basically moved around all the students over the course of this week having these and you ate dinner, lunch and breakfast with them, which was just amazing because they just put all the food on. It was three course meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was amazing and, um, but yeah, you just got to speak all day chatting and it was. You just learned about so many people's lives and it was such a cool method of what they called their final step, full immersion, where they just had to converse that's a very difficult step yeah I think, because even now I'm not fluent in speaking.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 26:24
I can understand, so if someone else is talking with someone else in spanish, I can understand everything, but I can pitch in in the conversation in english, because my spanish conversation is very low yeah, yeah, but man, I'm impressed that that you've learned so many languages.

Mark Smith: 26:42
Anything else that you can share about SLB and how you know why do you think it has scaled to the size is phenomenal. The number of apps, the number of automations has Alan been really the driving force of all that happening, like it seems that he is, and is that how it's kind of spread out across the organization?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 27:01
I believe so. I mean Power Platform. I don't think it was big. When I joined SLP it was just starting, from what I understood as well, and it was the feeling was at least my feeling was that Alan was kind of driving at least in the EUR, and then he got the attention of the HQ, they created that digital engagement position, engagement manager position and they got him there to drive it throughout SLB so that obviously that feels like Alan was doing the right thing back there and driving power platform. And maybe it's not just power platform but is the ability to scale with power platform faster and I think slb with the size, uh, the size of slb, we do need that ability to scale up and down, if you want um and we have an it, but it's not as big to service 100,000 employees and the needs that the different countries have. So using Power Platform is a logical step to help out and have citizen developers build solutions for their own use at their own country with their own specific laws or specific processes.

Mark Smith: 28:20
Yeah, you know you talked about the agent system, the three H's and that culture of really hungry to learn and hungry to train other people as well, and I love humility. You know one of my favorite quotes is stay humble and curious, because you'll always keep discovering. You know new things and do you see anything else that kind of made it possible to scale as large as you has? Are there any other kind of ingredients in that mix of why SLB has become so successful on the power platform?

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 28:57
I think obviously COVID-19 played a role as well, because people needed lots of solutions fast to tackle different things, and lots of analytics as well, because you know, analytics during COVID-19 was a must Analyzing data that we were receiving, either for cases, for vaccinations, to send people to the to to the platforms, to the wells. That's important in order to operate um. So I think coordinating was one, but also I think power platform is fun. Right, you can do so many different things. Fun things make an application that might be for a very boring process, but if you make the application fun, then the boring process becomes fun as well. So I think the Power Platform itself helps in that.

Mark Smith: 29:53
That's so cool. That's really cool, as in that fun element, I don't hear it often and straightaway. I'm thinking about how I would pitch that to an executive and the importance of it. Georgia, it's been so good having you on and to tell your story and be agent 001. I just think is amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Georgia Tsoraklidou: 30:14
Thank you, Mark, for having me. I enjoyed it a lot. Thank you.

Mark Smith: 30:19
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.