Center of Excellence from the field with Keith Whatling

[Mark Smith]: 0:52
In this episode, we're going to be focusing on the Center of Excellence, Center of Enablement from an expert who's been doing it for many years in the field.Our guest today is from Workingham,England. I used to live in England. He's the principal technologist at HSO.He's a seasoned public speaker and community leader. The first time I met him was at a hackathon in London. where he pulled up on things like UX, which impressed me because so many people in IT don't focus on user experience and user interface design, all very important things. His bio and socials as always can be found in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Keith.How's it going?

[Keith Whatling]: 1:40
I am all right, Mark. All right, yeah, not too bad. I'm from, so you've pronounced it, I was just slightly wrong and it does annoy the Americans ever so much because I'm from Wokingham, where all of the woke people are coming from, mate. Yeah,

[Mark Smith]: 1:52
wow woke that's where the woke that that's the the inception of wokeness

[Keith Whatling]: 1:56
yeah, it's,and they genuinely believe, like I say, I make a joke quite often that it's where woke people come from.Obviously not being very inclusive and woke for taking the mickey out of my beloved American counterparts, but. I do find it quite entertaining.It is a very tolerant place though, but you do have to have a food intolerance to live in. So you have to have, because otherwise it's not, you're not middle-class enough because it's like the most middle-class area. So you have to have some bizarre allergy. I myself have one. So yeah, we're all in the same boat here.You've got to be tolerant, but intolerant.

[Mark Smith]: 2:29
Well, the last time you were on where I had you on the MVP show and so it was some time ago, right? There was like mid-COVID world times back then. No, it was pre-COVID. I was in England at the time. I was living in the UK then.

[Keith Whatling]: 2:48
Pre-COVID, I was married, the world was still in one place. Wow, I think I was still at CustomerLand.I don't think I'd moved to partner yet.

[Mark Smith]: 3:00
I think so. I think so. I would have done that recording from my flat in London.

[Keith Whatling]: 3:06
Yeah, wow, that's bizarre.I would have done it from

[Mark Smith]: 3:09
That's nuts, eh?

[Keith Whatling]: 3:10
my dining room and my ex-wife would have been going nuts for me stealing all of the blankets and hanging them from the walls and windows to try and give you good sound quality.

[Mark Smith]: 3:19
yeah, yeah, yeah, to mute things.And of course now just about everybody has some type of good setup, right? Because of COVID,everyone used to online meetings and things like that to create these nice environments to record it.

[Keith Whatling]: 3:31
I mean, if you're not middle-aged and got a podcast, I mean, who are you, eh?

[Mark Smith]: 3:35
Exactly, exactly.

[Keith Whatling]: 3:38
I've not got one Mark, because I'm not middle aged.

[Mark Smith]: 3:39
I smile when I... Are you not?

[Keith Whatling]: 3:44
No, well I am technically.

[Mark Smith]: 3:45
I'm not middle-aged either.

[Keith Whatling]: 3:46
Are you not? Okay. Well, I mean, you know. I think I'm holding it. Yeah. Jesus. And

[Mark Smith]: 3:49
I'm old-aged now. Beyond middle.

[Keith Whatling]: 3:55
I'm 45 in a few weeks, mate. It doesn't feel right. Like,

[Mark Smith]: 3:57
Wow, 45, eh?

[Keith Whatling]: 3:58
I don't know. Dude, it's getting on. I know.

[Mark Smith]: 4:01
Good value, man, good value.Let's crack into what we wanna discuss today, which is a question that has been burning on my mind for some time, where, what are we, five or six years into the Power Platform journey from when Microsoft made the change,they separated Dynamics 365 and the underlying layer, created what we have now,Dataverse, and of course, the whole concept of being able to produce apps and automation at scale became possible.

[Keith Whatling]: 4:31
I seem to remember the conversation was, well, we had to go at CDS version one,and then we took dynamics and sellotape it onto Power Platform with a lot of purple gaffer tape and we spent six months getting it right.And then we sort of started working that thing.

[Mark Smith]: 4:47
I think it's more than six months, right? I think it was more than six months. It's interesting.Charles Lamanna just did a post about two weeks ago where he talked about the entire journey. And yeah, it was quite interesting being that most of us experienced that journey, you know,that went through and that separation and that probably decision to build that CDS10like it was and chucked away within12 months. And then... you know, CDS2 or what ultimately became Dataverse that now exists. What I'm interested in is, is just some background from you. Not like I ask on other shows, family, food, fun. What I want to know from a background perspective is around the power platform.Just give me the elevator pitch of your experience in the power platform.

[Keith Whatling]: 5:37
We are at the first part.

[Mark Smith]: 5:39
And I'm talking about current tense, not your journey to get here, but your current,you know,

[Keith Whatling]: 5:42
Oh yeah, no problem. All right.

[Mark Smith]: 5:43
what you're doing. Yeah.

[Keith Whatling]: 5:45
What am I doing? I spend a lot of time thinking about how we should make apps from a technical standpoint.So thinking how to make apps excellently,quickly and cost-effectively. That's the technical standpoint of like my kind of job, I suppose.ensuring that there's quality in there. I don't want Steve Mordue, um, coining anything that I do is one of his, uh, you know, profanity,

[Mark Smith]: 6:17
Shit apps. Yep.

[Keith Whatling]: 6:18
extremely shitty little apps.Yeah. Which is very good. Um, very good, very good podcast there. Um,but I also spend a lot of time thinking about the strategy and the trajectory and talking to customers about the strategy and trajectory of power platform inside their organizations.And part of that strategy, um, includes. this notion of the C O E whatever that is supposed to mean. But I think it's a weird one. It's, I mean,it started off that organizations just needed some indication of what was going on. And in fact, in a lot of organizations it was happening and... right back before the center of excellence was even born, but the IT department were way more excited about it than when we actually went and started talking to about the center of excellence.I was like, yeah, okay, do we really need this for what's going on over here? And then basically,I think what sort of happened with the center of excellence and I think everyone on the call hopefully knows what the center of excellence is and this kind of monitoring tool. Um, the center of excellence toolkit anyway,is a monitoring tool that Microsoft have put together and they've kind of extended it with loads of, um, kind of apps that do admin tasks and things.And it's a, it's a jumping off point for extending your own data to monitor and manage power platform inside your organization.Um, but I think that the reason why that came about was because there was this,just this sort of fear. Um,and it's all been predicated by fear and it's paralyzed so many people that like we were going to have another access and people call power apps

[Mark Smith]: 8:06
Correct.

[Keith Whatling]: 8:07
per access. And there was this mention of sprawl. And you have to say that with a, with a sort of film, uh, announcers accent,there was some sprawl and,um, and it's like, you know, team sprawl and SharePoint sprawl and there's all these Excel workbooks everywhere. And how am I ever going to get track and keep track of it? And. Well, the answer was basically. Um, and I found this time and time again, everywhere I went was that like P 95% of the customers that I spoke to, and I mean the app makers and the people building,you know, Steve's shitty little apps, but actually didn't some pretty stonking work most of the time,

[Mark Smith]: 8:49
Totally.

[Keith Whatling]: 8:50
um, was, um, was that they were managing. it very well. And the only problem happened was when they left the business. Now I left the business. I was a customer. I left the business in 2019 and I left, um, 36,000 lines of VBA,which took me two and a half months to hand over and refactor and rebuild.And I left around about 60power apps that took me two weeks to hand over.So, you know,go and figure that out,right?

[Mark Smith]: 9:20
that's interesting,right?That's a telling story there.

[Keith Whatling]: 9:23
Yeah. Like, so So there's a theory and a reality there. Um, and I also found one thing that, that sort of makes me question how much, um, governance and how much value we all put in locking the power platform down and like, you know, preventing it from happening inside of organizations is that almost every single app that we encountered, every single flow that we I've yet to find one of malicious intent over the

[Mark Smith]: 9:57
Correct.

[Keith Whatling]: 9:59
thousands that I've looked at. And I've looked at thousands, right? Well, we trawled through and cleaned up many large organizations, states, and I've yet to find a malicious one. Now,not to say that some of them aren't breaking the rules, right? Like someone replicating their, their,their outlook calendar in Google calendar.purely because they want to get, and I'm not gonna say her name, my perfectly well-named home assistant to replicate their calendar when she's speaking,right? Fair place. But,

[Mark Smith]: 10:34
100% you wake up in the morning you want to ask a question right?

[Keith Whatling]: 10:36
do you know what I mean? What's my calendar today, right? That's a genuine thing that I wanna happen.But we weren't finding that. Why? Because the people who were building these apps were quite often the best of the sort of people that you'd want inside of an organization. They were change agents. They had identified a problem. They were working in their own time outside the boundaries of work to improve the business. And if you look at that, you ask yourself one question and you know, you might have people criticize the quality of the work that they do. And I completely support helping making that better. But the fact of the matter is. these people are driving your business forward, they're adding value and that is a fantastic story on every single day of the week. Now, what can I do to help you?And I think that's where like,Center of Excellence comes in from an enablement point of view. And look, COE has got a name that nobody liked. Center implies some sort of ownership. Um,and then this whole excellence thing kind of got misconstrued and people have already had centers of excellence for engineering or center excellence for this, that, and the other, and they're quite often failed. Um, but it was, it was, it was born out of a, a very early incarnation of power platform where a few people in Microsoft were like, well, what the heck do we call this thing? And it wasn't a market and budget. They just invented something. They did the pure power

[Mark Smith]: 12:12
No. Correct.

[Keith Whatling]: 12:12
platform thing and they came up with it. So it's like, all right, everybody.Let's just calm down. Let's just take a step back. Call it whatever you want, right? Call it the,the area for technological business improvement.Call it meaningful digital transformation, right? But let the damn kite strings go. Let people start building, help them be better. And you will see amazing things happen inside of your business. Full stop end of story.

[Mark Smith]: 12:36
I like it. I like that thinking.I like that you've highlighted that you haven't found malicious apps. And I find it interesting that the use case that anybody that has a blue badge often uses is that, you know, you can put a DLP policy that doesn't allow your system to connect to Twitter. So your private data like, and of course, who has ever done that? I've never come across a use. And it's an extreme fearful use case.to set an organization at ease. But you're right, nobody intentionally goes out. The other thing I really liked and what you highlighted there is that these smart people live inside the business,that they have been using other tools to do this up to this point. I mean,why does Access Databases exist?Why does Fox Pro systems exist? Why does amazing Excel spreadsheets exist?Because in each case, it was somebody at the coal face, so to speak. We're building solutions that there wasn't an IT product

[Keith Whatling]: 13:41
Correct.

[Mark Smith]: 13:41
or IT was going, oh yeah, we'll solve that for you. And if we look at what most of those solutions were,they were often an aggregate of various data sets inside the organization that people were traditionally using Control C,Control V, Copy Paste, right,to try and make sense of it. And so... They became the real glue of an organization and that they enabled people to be more productive in their day-to-day job, but there wasn't an IT department they could turn around and say, build me this, because the IT folks wouldn't necessarily understand what was being asked for. And I'll give you an example. I worked at a bank around loan origination and all approvals of all loans was done in an Excel spreadsheet. Because there wasn't,and I'm talking about over 20 years ago. There wasn't a off the shelf solution that the bank was using that did that scenario.So each day all staff logged in and they got the latest version of that Excel spreadsheet and they calculated any of the loans they're going to process that day in that spreadsheet full of macros, etc. And it did its job. If you didn't have these people, and of course,it wasn't somebody who was mandated, you build the Excel spreadsheet, right?That's going to make this team work. No, it was built because of need and necessity inside the organization. We moved that forward. Brian Cunningham said an interesting thing. How do we know what people are doing? Active directory,right? We've got to think of single sign-on.We've got a sign-on mechanism that now gives us a visibility about who's doing what. You never had that in Excel. You never had that in Access and other systems. And so...

[Keith Whatling]: 15:15
Correct.

[Mark Smith]: 15:16
That gives you a powerful insight and view into what's going on. And as you say,in most situations, you're not seeing bad behavior. How, let's switch gears now and look at then when, go for it, go for it. Good.

[Keith Whatling]: 15:26
Let's flip that around the other way one minute, because there's a message that you need to get, I really want to get out there to a lot of people, right? Tell your IT folks this,50% of the formulas from Power Apps are from Excel. 50% of the code you can write in Power Apps is directly the same as Excel. But 50% of Excel is not in Power Apps, right? It's more like 1%. of all of the formulas you could write. And there ain't no macros, right? So unless you're going in and turning on PCFs and unless you're going in and kind of configuring stuff and all this configuration,by the way, it's like the actual technical configurations is days and weeks to put together in terms of a automated architectural deployment pipeline.If you wanna do it like all completely automated,but it's day or so. of just a few meetings. It doesn't take long to configure anything. It's all of the bloody meetings you've got to have around configuring it. It's always, you know,thousands of hours of meetings and on what to turn on and then two minutes to turn it on. Um, but if you look at it, like VBA, like the stuff I could do in VBA, we could screen scrape websites.We'd written things to handle cookies. We were doing RPA in Excel. We were sending data out. We were deleting workbooks in Excel. Good God. I have one thing that if you took a workbook outside of our domain and you opened it, it would look and see,oh, I'm no longer in the domain I belong to.Oh, I'm going to send Keith an SMS text message and an email and communicate with me any way I can. The chain of custody of all of the people that had that workbook before that person where it was deleted, I'm going to delete that workbook as well. Right?So perhaps that doesn't do it. Does it? Like,you know, what more? You know,it's just Anyway, right, go on. Well, you were gonna make some profound statement there, Mark, and I hope you remember it. Ha ha!

[Mark Smith]: 17:21
No, I was going to switch gears and go into, tell me your experience of going in and you're the first person in that has had long tenure and working on the platform. You get called in to an organization and they say, hey, you know, we've got the E3 or the E5 Cal and we have a couple of pro licenses maybe. And they've got this massive... bucket of apps and automations and things and nobody really knows what's going on. They've got no visibility of that. What's your thinking in your process that you go and go, OK, these are the kind of key things I'm going to look at. Do you move them from a,you know, a clean up state to a operational state that allows them to scale in a fashion that they know how they're scaling? Right. They make informed decisions.

[Keith Whatling]: 18:17
But yeah, yeah. So you've got the traditional SharePoint app estate, maybe a few bits and pieces knocking around, there's potentially a load of stuff in Excel, everything's free text everywhere. There might be very low levels of skill inside of the organization.But the worst thing that you can possibly do is go in there and tell them it's a load of rubbish because they've just done an amazing thing. You know, they just created fresh net new technology that is bespoke and custom to their business. So it's just about sensitively,um, moving them along and taking people with you on that journey. And it's about like helping them let go of the reins in some case, helping them hold on tighter to the reins in some case and in, and speed up and also slow down at the same time. So. It's very much you have to meet people on their battlefield. And,you know, look, I will recommend Dataverse to all the cows come home,you know,for all of the reasons that we talk about, but mainly is that every app I've ever built, I have to build, like if I'm building on SharePoint or building on any other data source that doesn't have a model driven framework where views and forms are rendered in a data framework, right, it's the fact that I have to build the backend. Right. Like, I mean, the back office app, I have to build an app for the front end. And then I have to build it. I probably in that same app, I've got an admin button and then I have to sign out to be able to little password hidden in the app and all this horrible nastiness and then like, you know, I never forget Martin Lee. When he was first doing it, he was, he made an app for managing his apps. And I was like, that's a model driven app, right? Like that's just a diverse right there. And then so We go in, but we, so it depends on the size of the organization,but quite often the larger organization starts with a proper conversation with the, with the leadership, um, more than anything. Um, I'm really not up for, um, kind of going in there and saying,well, let's help you build more faster. Straight up. Like

[Mark Smith]: 20:33
Nice.

[Keith Whatling]: 20:33
let's get away from building apps and building flows. Like that's. We want,we will help you do that.Or we will build that for you. We will give you the capability or we will give you the capacity to do more of that.Great. Okay. Fine. And that's it done. See you later. Right. There's this whole other piece about the ecosystem,about the data architecture,the data ecosystem, the ethos inside of the business, why they building apps. Okay. Why, why do they need this thing in the first place? Where are you going? What are your goals? What are you trying to get towards?Do you even want people inside of your organization building? apps and workflows,because in some organizations we encounter very, very senior people who have got an absolute B in their bonnet about technology, they should be pilling at a ridiculous rate and they're kind of solving this problem in that access. And it's the problem that they've been solving for donkey's years. And it's like, okay, well, that person loves doing that, but could they just draw it? or do something to make it faster. So I think part of it is like freeing them up to do more stuff really, and figuring out what the strategy of the organization is. And that's more than just going in there and locking it down, turning it on and off.You've got to have very deep,meaningful conversations with people. especially around the data and the data and enterprise architecture and the ecosystem inside of the organization.Like how, where is this, where, you know, all the bits of where the, where the data is mastered. Um, we, we talk a lot as well around the, the data verse piece. If we can get people to data verse,we generally try to, because creating that sort of institutional data model,um, that's where that's going to happen, you know? Um, so yeah, just. It's more than just that.

[Mark Smith]: 22:32
Yeah, what if we can generalize,what are general barriers that you've run into in organizations that you've seen more than once come up? And then, second part of that question, then how did you go about addressing them?

[Keith Whatling]: 22:52
Well, I mean, I suppose the number one thing that always comes up is cost.Um, cost, cost, cost, cost, cost. That's the number one thing. And, um, I think in many IT organizations, uh, sorry,many organizations, not just IT organizations,but many organizations, um,you've got to think of Microsoft like, um,just your normal supermarket,right? You go in, you buy your e-thrives. You buy your E3s, you get a bit of Azure, you wander out the door. No one's been used to buying a software license for anything else other than some very specific bits for years. They pay all of their money to some big ERP companies,right? They got this honking great 200, 300 dollar pounds per user thing and they're just not used to that feeling of spending a lot of money with Microsoft. right on user licenses for bespoke development. And there's a lack of faith that this tool is of sufficient quality to render mission critical or mission important workloads. No one is bothered about my favorite app, what's in the office fridge app. You know, someone's left a dodgy sandwich or something and they want to have a picture and all that kind of stuff. But no one's bothered about that one. They don't care about half of those ones, but they all care about the mission critical one,but they're nowhere near ready for doing that.And you've got to take them on a journey there. So the first thing that they're all massively, massively upset about is cost. And there's a,

[Mark Smith]: 24:38
how do you address it?

[Keith Whatling]: 24:39
well, primarily education and comparison. you've really got to kind of break it down. You've got to do your homework. So it's no good, um, running around with a forest report,uh, or a garden, a magic quadrant and saying, that's it. You know, go and, go and price the same app up. If Mendex was doing it, go and figure out how much it would cost to do that in Python flask Django,whatever, whatever framework you want to use, right. And then. you probably come out and it will be the picture probably won't be great. Right. It might not be massively cheaper.Might be a bit cheaper and everyone will go,don't really, I really think that's worthwhile, but then that's the price every time for building one of those and we're talking about an ecosystem built on top of data verse.Cause we're paying premium. So if we're paying premium, we might as well use data versus the backend or at least some of the backend for it. Right.

[Mark Smith]: 25:41 
100%.

[Keith Whatling]: 25:42
So then you're starting to stack workloads on top of one another, and you're starting to benefit from the institutional data model and master data management transitioning things down into the devolved enterprise architectures,right? So, sorry, environmental architectures. So you start to really kind of... benefit from that. And then you start seeing patterns emerge and you start seeing techniques emerge and you start seeing the ability to literally copy and paste stuff out of one application into another. And you get to a point where you have, you end up in an organization where everybody ideally,and it's probably not going to be very popular with Microsoft for saying this one Mark, but I think as a minimum everybody, and you heard it here first, you'd have two apps,right? One app is uh, my bat's belt, right?Which is what I need to turn up as Batman, but batwoman,bat person for work. And it's got, it's got all the stuff I need. You know, I can,I can book my holiday. I can buy some new uniform. I can check my van. I can, um, you know, check my equipment,all that stuff.And then I've got the, my work app. So I've got the bat cave app where I kind of, you know, find all the baddies and go and fight them and all that kind of stuff. Right.So. I've got two very distinct things. I've got something about my person is all about me and my place inside of the workplace. And then I've got apps. I needed to do my job or workloads. I need to do my job. Now I'm talking about apps because I'm the power apps guy, but like in, in all honesty, quite often these days, um, I can answer most of the app. Well, I'd say 30%of the app requests that I get with a chat box.or sometimes just not at all do it with AI. So there's a lot less application development out there. And I always challenge people and say, well, you need a, you need a power virtual agent, but that's the point. So going out there,doing your homework, pricing stuff up properly, making sure that you, you kind of, you've got the benefits down long-term and that you can't have that benefits conversation.About the next app or the next workload and the workload after that,the workload after that, unless you've had the ecosystem. and the strategy conversation with the CIO,CTO, whoever in IT up front. And that stuff takes time. So the other big tip is to think about where you are inside of their fiscal year, because there's no point in going in halfway through the fiscal year, trying to sell them a like strategy to build a thousand apps right there. And then you, you, you could go in halfway through the fiscal year. and start planning for next year and saying, look, let's do a proof of value solution and then see about working towards next year. But yeah, that's the tricky bit is getting people on board.And that's in every organization. That's not just selling it in externally,but that's also internally inside of organizations trying to upsell it to the IT leadership team.

[Mark Smith]: 28:46
That was one problem, challenge that we just talked through then. I know we're coming up on time. Do you have another one? Common problem that you've come across, that's consistent. Things that jump to my mind is IT are really putting their foot down and it's an IT led initiative and there's no business buy-in.Sometimes it can be challenging.Sometimes I see no senior stakeholders at the table and that concerns me straight away.What are yours? What's another one over the spend?

[Keith Whatling]: 29:18
Well, that's, that's absolutely it. It's the buy-in. Um, so you've often got,um, a pocket of the IT team who really want to push forward on it, um,who are all in, but they haven't got the buy-in of the rest of the IT team and the problem is, is because people move into IT organizations doing what they did at the last place.So you've, you've quite. often find you'll have done six months, years worth of work with somebody. And then new C-suite

[Mark Smith]: 29:54
I'm out.

[Keith Whatling]: 29:54
person comes in and they say,Oh, I'm the SharePoint guy. I'm the SAP guy.Mark's dying by the way, he's just, I'll give you some sound effects and some sympathy in a minute.Oh dear Mark, it's gone purple.

[Mark Smith]: 30:12
Sorry, just a tickly throat there.

[Keith Whatling]: 30:12

So yeah.That's every, every good podcast that as happens to every good news presenter at some point, Mark, you know,if you're going to be, if you're going to be middle aged and have a podcast mate is what you've got to, that's what is going to happen to you eventually.

[Mark Smith]: 30:23
It's so true,so true.

[Keith Whatling]: 30:26
So yeah, so basically I think,I think the thing is, um, that, that stakeholder bit is, and getting that buy-in is just so, so, so important. And, um, it worries,like you say, it worries me that like people are paying tacit attention to this. or they're paying attention to it because somebody has told them to, and the IT team have been forced into doing this. Um, and it's quite often there isn't the, and what they don't realize is they're missing out on a wonderful chance to heal the relationship with the business where IT is seen as a blocker and all the reasons why you can't do something.Whereas this will absolutely transform the ability of IT to, to deliver and drop value inside of an organization. Cause it, IT like. Santa Claus,right? They come once a year,you know, it's got a load of presence, big ERP deployment, whatever,whatever, whatever. But everything else that happens inside the organization,they don't really affect anybody. But then imagine if every week, someone was saying, Oh, I use IT helped me build this app. IT helped me automate my life. IT helped me make some AI. That's a completely different value proposition. IT aren't ready for that level of success. And that's,that's different. It's that you go from being a support function,support functions, IT support to potentially a profit center where you've got people, I've got customers who are like,why wouldn't I build these things? Every time I build one, I save hundreds of thousands of pounds. So yeah, I've got one of my friends is literally like, his team are tasked, they've each got a budgetary figure. That's their bonus. Their bonus is basically, you have to save the business X hundred thousand pounds. this year, there's your, there's your, that's your bonus. That's it. How you do that inside of, with this technology,but you need to do it. That's your target.Go and do it.

[Mark Smith]: 32:19
I love it.

[Keith Whatling]: 32:20
And at the same time, he's securing the cookie jar. He sees your key.He's securing the estate,with, you know, COE tools and, and,

[Mark Smith]: 32:30
Exactly.

[Keith Whatling]: 32:30
and extensions and all the rest of it. So yeah.

[Mark Smith]: 32:32
Last question before we wrap. Opinion on managed environments.

[Keith Whatling]: 32:34
Cool,man.Um, I think they're awesome.Um, uh, sound like Chris Antifor, but I said that the night's awesome.Um, I think they're really good. I think they,they, um, if you were an IT led organization and you were looking and wanting to do power platform, right.Um, and you were looking at the cost of doing business inside a power platform.And a lot of, a lot of what holds power platform back is that IT is reluctance to recruit anybody into the role. Of,of this. assumed center of excellence lead or this assumed governance lead. And the problem is, is because it's a, it's a bloody big job.If you start managing hundreds of environments, thousands of apps, all that kind of stuff, well, managing environments is there to help you do that.Now, if you are clever and you do go down the, the, the licensed route,and Microsoft meets you with managed environments. So if you're, if you've gone data verse and you've bit the bullet, then there it's even more reason.to be in the managed environment space because you're paying for it with your data verse, you're getting data verse as a bonus, you've just saved 35,000minimum on an IT person to come and sit in the seat and do the donkey work or 50, 60 grand in writing all the automation scripts and everything to do X, Y, Z and the ALM accelerator.I mean, good God, the amount of time and effort people spend on writing ALM scripts, you know, you say. I need some ALM doing for this that project.Oh, that's, you know, 150hours, 200 hours. And it's like, we'll just turn on manage environments.I want, wouldn't you? You're paying for the licenses anyway. It's simple, isn't it? Simple equation.

[Mark Smith]: 34:17
Keith, I love it. I love it.it's a simple equation. It's been a pleasure to have you on the show again. I feel like we might have to not wait too long before you do another one around the subject because we're in build week at the moment. There's so many new things dropping. We didn't even tap into what's the impact of AI to what we do on a day-to-day basis and how that's going to impact customers. And I'd like to unpack that with you in the future.