Cloud Mastery and Strategic Modernization with James, Andrew and Ana

Mark Smith: 0:30
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. Welcome back to the Ecosystem Podcast. We are doing something new today. We have a guest on the show. In fact, we have three guests. They're on the wall behind Anna. I'm sure they were created by ChatGPT. I take it's a family photo. Is that an AI-generated family photo?

Ana Welch: 1:04
It is. It's an AI-generated family photo, because if we take, it's not even a real photo, but it could be. You just like three ordinary people, apart from our child, who does look exactly like that, I kid you not. And they just like AI just makes you prettier happier younger.

Mark Smith: 1:26
Think of the poor photographer that just lost that job because of AI.

Andrew Welch: 1:32
Yeah, we've paid proper photographers too.

Ana Welch: 1:35
Exactly, yeah, awesome, awesome, yeah, we've, we've, we've paid proper photographers too, exactly, yeah, awesome, awesome now we've had a baby and a wedding in the last two years.

Andrew Welch: 1:42
We are keeping the photography business in.

Mark Smith: 1:46
Yeah right yeah, nice andrew, why don't you introduce our real guest of the show, james, and tell us why we're here and what big world challenge are we going to solve in the next 30 minutes?

Andrew Welch: 2:00
Yeah. So we wanted to do something something, as Mark said, new today and we're going to, I think, do more of this start to have guests, people whose thoughts we respect and who we think are at least somewhat interesting, on the show. I've known James for a long time. He has actually James has served hard time, in that he was once my direct manager, and the fact that we're still friends after that is probably a good sign.

Andrew Welch: 2:31
James is the managing director of the commercial business group at a Microsoft partner called Applied Information Sciences, AIS. They are a bunch of very, very bright people who are doing some really interesting work and have been for a long time around cloud adoption and artificial intelligence and, on the heels of Mark and my conversation in the last episode about trends that we're seeing across the global economy in terms of CapEx and OpEx and investment curves for AI, we thought we'd have James join so we could talk a little bit about and take on the topic of the why right, If organizations are going to be investing the kind of money and the kind of effort and the kind of human capital in this modernization that many are starting to take on, they should really be asking themselves hard questions about why they're doing what they hope to achieve. So with that, James, welcome to the podcast, and my first question for you is can you tell us that little story that you shared from the last couple of weeks about a conversation you had on this topic?

James Joyce: 3:42
Sure. Thank you first of all, for inviting me on to the show. Andrew and I, as Andrew said, have known each other for many years and we share a passion for creating the vision and the strategy for organizations to move forward with their investments. This really started around cloud in general and then progressed to low code and now, of course, ai is such a hot topic for everybody and I see you know repeating kind of stories or repeating challenges that our clients face when we get engaged with them, challenges that our clients face when we get engaged with them.

James Joyce: 4:18
The example that Andrew was mentioning recently was another client who is eager to adopt the cloud, is eager to work in the cloud and set up the foundations and the governance and security and scalability. But when I met with them first and started to ask things like you know, what is the benefit here, what is the mission, what is the, the outcomes you're looking for, they really struggled again with trying to answer that question and I feel like often organizations follow the latest trends or perhaps their C-suite have said, hey, you need to, you need to do this thing because everybody else is doing it, and then they jump in and they get busy trying to implement. So in this case, the response from the client stakeholders that I talked to was that well, you know, we're doing stuff in the cloud already, so we thought it's probably a good idea to shore up our security and governance posture and make sure that the stuff that's in there is ready and can be used by the organization, but without any real strategy for or motivation behind it. There was no top down executive mandate in this case and there was no desire or motivation from the business to actually use cloud services. And there was no desire or motivation from the business to actually use cloud services.

James Joyce: 5:38
Yet this group felt it was important for them to invest a non-insignificant amount of money to build a cloud platform, and it's almost like if we build it, they will come without building it in parallel with the rest of the business. So Andrew and I have had this passion for many years of building a roadmap and a strategy for organizations. That's not the high level business strategy that organizations typically will receive from some of the partners that they work with, but one that kind of bridges the gap between that business outcome and the business value that can be achieved through leveraging these services. And then the implementable plan, the actionable plan that they can take, because I feel like that's another challenge that these organizations face. They really struggle with how do I execute on this plan and what are all the steps to connect the dots to achieve those outcomes.

Mark Smith: 6:33
It's interesting because straight away what jumps to mind is how many licenses can they buy for that right? Like most partners are like you know. So how many people you got like you know, do you need X? You know, and it's like straight into what Microsoft product are we going to sell you? Obviously, that model that you're going through is quite a different conversation at a different level in the organization. I assume that's just not happening in the IT department.

James Joyce: 7:01
The problem, I believe, with cloud in particular is that cloud as an infrastructure environment or replacement for traditional data centers lives traditionally in an IT infrastructure organization. So when C-Suite says, hey, go, make cloud happen, they go to their infrastructure group initially and a lot of work happens there, but nobody recognizes that cloud is something that should be addressed and considered across the entire organization and so you need to have product owners and business owners and software development teams and leadership across the entire organization in the same conversation at the same time so everybody can be kind of tracking against the same goals and outcomes. And often we see, particularly in larger organizations, that we work with such a siloed structure that they really then struggle with how to actually collaborate together because they're they've been built on the success of strong individual silos and things being kind of thrown across the fence to each other rather than having to truly work as a team to achieve these outcomes together do you see some of these silos?

Ana Welch: 8:11
um creating multiple littler silos within the big silos.

Andrew Welch: 8:19
Oh, without a doubt.

James Joyce: 8:24
And you know, in some cases, as you, can imagine, there's a lot of political challenges at times and conflicts and politics. We say in many cases, you know, it or public cloud infrastructure may have started with AWS in an organization and there's a maybe robust team or structure for that. But then other teams, other groups want to use Azure services and you know the other side of the organization says no, we're good, we've got our public cloud infrastructure already set up, we use AWS. And then the M3CC5 team decides well, it's Microsoft Cloud, we will just stand up an Azure environment and we'll do our own thing over here, and then we'll call it the Microsoft Cloud and then they gain, you know, a few steps forward and then suddenly conflict arises, the question about hey, why are you doing cloud over here? Because we do cloud over there, and usually chaos ensues at that point also.

Andrew Welch: 9:27
This is that phenomenon that I've called the IT Tower of Babel before, right, where, if you think back to the story that all these folks in the tower, they all spoke different languages, right, and they couldn't communicate with one another I think it's a biblical story. But, in any case, I'm working with an organization that they are investing heavily in their building a data platform like a proper data platform, and applause to that, right. It's one of all the organizations I've talked to about this that this one is maybe taking it the most seriously, so it's great that they're doing this. But I've introduced them to this notion, right, that we can't just build a downstream data platform in isolation of any sort of knowledge or joined up, thinking about what you're doing with data collection or with your core business systems or your application portfolio or that kind of integration layer in the center data and application integration, master data management, and it's just you know. So it's not surprising anymore, right? But I see so many of these organizations that are just still doing these things, these things, separately.

James Joyce: 10:40
So, our philosophy has always been to, you know, drive innovation. We're, you know, an organization, my company of curious technical individuals who are always trying to enable technology. But really that innovation has to bring business value, has to be aligned to the outcomes and the business value that can be created. Everything else from that is really downstream or in support or the foundations of that success. And really that strategy should be built on the business objectives or the business outcomes that can be achieved and then from there all of the things underlying that need to be put in place. But I think it often starts, particularly in cloud, in a different direction. It starts at the bottom level of okay, let's establish your cloud foundations and then we'll figure out somewhere along the way how that might be used in support of the business.

Mark Smith: 11:32
How do you make sure you get high enough in the stack inside an account to have these conversations? I'll give you an example. Yesterday I was talking with a seller in my organization that works with a very large global account that is in the mining sector and the the issue they have is that their relationships are not high enough in the executive decision tree. So therefore, when in this case it was a discussion around the power platform, everything was a tactical play. It wasn't a a strategic play in the organization and you know microsoft had sold a bazillion licenses in there.

Mark Smith: 12:16
Three years on, Not many have been used right and so they went on this whole thing like, yes, this is going to be the thing that solves world peace inside the organization. Three years on, I know the question is about to come up, probably driven by the CFO what's a slime item here that we're paying so much money for and nobody inside the organization can articulate why it's a good idea the people that originally put it on right over three years. People move jobs, so even the person's going to dodge the bullet that made the purchase. How do you take from a here's our relationship at this level, which is generally the person that's been assigned to run it right.

Mark Smith: 13:02
They've got no authority whatsoever the platform owner yeah, the platform owner, who is like it's one of their 50 other things on their plate, right? So it's not a big deal. How do you, with a customer, make sure you're playing at the right level of game, that you're either going up to either the CTO, the CIO, the CDO Ultimately they'll all report into the CFO and the CFO into the CEO. So how do you make sure that you're getting at that level of game to have these conversations, because they're no good having it too far down the decision? You know the, the silo, if you like, of who can make these kind of decisions it's a great question.

James Joyce: 13:43
Um, there's a, there's a few parts, uh, I guess. To my answer um, you know, as a, as a, as a company, that is, you know, for profit, trying to do business with clients who are trying to enable the use of these technologies. We of course are eager to, to start working, uh, with these vendors, to start getting paid and so forth. But through the course of many years of doing this, we realized that jumping in quickly doesn't provide a good outcome for either the vendor or for us, because there's too much confusion and uncertainty about what the value is. I like to tell stories quite a bit with my clients. To tell them. The story is kind of highlighting the risk of, you know, they're rushing to put a piece of this in place without thinking enough holistically, not thinking holistically that they're going to spin their wheels for you know, 12 months, which some clients do just analyzing to death the thing that they're trying to figure out, but incrementally moving things forward. I think we've very much embraced an agile philosophy going back 20 years of software development and that idea of incremental benefit as well. Helping move forward in these measurable kind of bite-sized chunks can help, but then still ultimately going back to telling the story of, you know, if we all come, you know, if we raise this up to the level that affects the entire organization, then we can start to make sure that the outcomes can be achieved and, like I said, telling stories of situations where clients that we interacted with in the past did not embrace that idea, did not believe in its importance and felt like again going back to maybe turf wars and politics. They have the ownership and responsibility of this. They don't want to bring in others because they don't want others to influence perhaps their authority or their ownership over executing on this and not again seeing the big picture.

James Joyce: 15:42
The other thing I'll say, because you brought up the example about Power Platform, that has its own unique issues, because where does Power Platform live? In an organization, at least Azure public cloud infrastructure lives, true, well, at least, as at an infrastructure level it lives in, you know, it infrastructure. Power Platform really struggles because it doesn't have a natural home. It doesn't really live in the business it doesn't quite live in. I don't know an enterprise architecture organization and typically organizations I've seen try to have it live in the infrastructure team but they don't enable the use of Power Plot and there isn't really much infrastructure to manage. There's governance and there's license management and information rights management, but they're not the enablers of the use of that technology because that's not their job right. They just maintain infrastructure and make it secure and so forth. So that has its own unique issues that Andrew and I have definitely dealt with in the past.

Andrew Welch: 16:40
Chris and Will are going to be sad. They missed that opportunity.

Ana Welch: 16:43
Right, they're really interested in that subject. Do you see, taking Mark's example here, a panic moment when a bunch of people are seeing that line item and for their sins, that they did not leave the organization yet, and the bad time to go right now? So, oh my god, I've gotta learn. You know where the power platform infrastructure code you, whatever's happening. Where does this leave? Do you see many of these people trying to get you know partners to help them? And then how do you convince them to spend even more money, because obviously the CFO is like got to get rid of this? How do we go and say, uh-uh, wait, this is a good thing, we can put controls in place. There's tooling, even if there are silos and other departments are working with AWS, we can play with that as well. Wait, don't rush, we can help here. How do we do that and how do we make sure again that we're talking to the right person?

James Joyce: 18:00
I've had a lot of conversations, even in the past 12 months, with leadership at Microsoft in different verticals and the frustration that they're feeling, and actually this, I think, is a good segue into a similar challenge and opportunity with Azure OpenAI. But these organizations are not typically going to commit to an enterprise-wide commitment of licenses for Power Platform. They want to learn the value, they want to experiment, they want to buy a few hundred licenses and see the benefit of that. Then they want to measure that impact and value and then they are typically willing to do more versus you know, I think, the Microsoft approach or other partner approach of selling this deal across the entire organization. We just haven't seen that be successful or that is definitely a tough path of a lot of engagement with the client to show them all those benefits over a long period of time anyway, before maybe that commitment is made. Our approach is typically let's start showing the value, let's start to prove the outcomes.

James Joyce: 19:12
We've run hackathons with clients where they can really quickly see that benefit being generated, bringing business, immediate business frustrations or use cases into a hackathon and within a couple of days build out lots of solutions. They're not fully production ready, but you can then take that back to the C-suite and you can say you can measure the return on investment to this issue. You know. You take the frustration, the inefficiency, the automation that could be in place and you start to measure that out across all of the end users of that process and all the time savings. Typically, right, the efficiency is brought often through time saving and it's pretty easy to calculate then across the end user base what that could look like. And then you know people like CFOs start to take it, pay attention to that and then you can start to change their mind. But then the ongoing enablement right, the education around. You know a platform like Power Platform. The enablement is key because I think the idea of it being a citizen developer platform was a little misleading.

James Joyce: 20:17
It is absolutely a platform that can be used quickly by folks without the complexity of pro development, but there's still standards and best practices. And the last thing I'll say here is that I used to be an engineer, c++ and C Sharp back in the day. I don't touch a keyboard anymore, but about a year and a half ago I wanted to build some quick applications. I thought, well, I'm going to use this opportunity to just get in there and knock out a couple of Power Apps and it'll be quick. It really took me a while to understand the well a different mindset of how to develop in Power Platform and build power apps.

James Joyce: 21:00
So it's you know, it's important to recognize that that that enablement has to be put in place at the organizational level for a platform investment like that to be fully uh uh, benefit, benefit the organization.

Mark Smith: 21:12
Saying that, um, uh, that it was. Uh, citizen developer was a I forget the term you use, but it was very generous the term you use because I think the concept of citizen development is probably caused more damage to where the power platform could have gone than what it has done because I see it relegated to uh, oh, that's for everything that we can't handle under an enterprise solution, and I just think it's a total misalignment that we are now having to correct, six years on, with big enterprise customers.

Ana Welch: 21:51
But it depends on the citizen developer because, for example and I'll just say this quick thing, sorry, andrew, I've been interrupting you for a bit now like in real life.

Andrew Welch: 22:04
They can edit this face onto the screen. Now, there we go.

Ana Welch: 22:09
I had an interview today, you know, with someone and she said that, oh, I don't do pro code, you know, I'm a citizen developer really. And then I dig a bit deeper and uncover the fact that she's done all of the Power Platform exams, plus the Office 365, because she was like something connecting to there. So I had to sort of you know, learn about that. And then she knew Azure and governance, and from governance she went to Purview and then she's like, oh, but that's all citizen developer. I'm like gosh, I wish all citizen developers felt like you.

Andrew Welch: 22:57
You know, it's like, okay, you're not saying it, go fine, yeah I know that's that's really interesting and when we we might have to come back to the why, uh, to the why and the motivation that we started this episode with on the next episode, but I'm going to keep running with that.

Andrew Welch: 23:18
Um, one of the things that I've noticed lately is in a few of the you know, talking with a few conference groups of conference organizers for these Microsoft conferences where you know I've put in and Anna and I present together very frequently, so we put in proposals to present a session at these conferences, to present a session at these conferences and you know, our whole theme, right, is where cloud infrastructure meets app dev, meets low code, meets the data platform, and that data is used by AI and oh, by the way, that means we have to govern and secure that data. So, have you met purview? We've been getting responses back from some of these conference organizers, right, that basically, oh well, you need to take all the non-power platform stuff out of the session because they wouldn't the power platform, people wouldn't really be interested in purview or data platform. I was actually recently asked, quite literally, to take all references to SQL out of a session proposal about the data platform, right.

Ana Welch: 24:25
And it was hard. We went through like three iterations or something like that. It was not like okay, yeah.

Andrew Welch: 24:32
Yeah, but these sessions that we do when we actually are there presenting, the rooms are packed. I mean, we've had done multiple of these sessions, ostensibly for an audience in one area of the cloud where we've been talking about okay, how can you pull together other cloud technologies into your world? I almost said into your purview, but that's not what I meant, and it's been standing room only in these sessions. So I can't tell right now if there's a real hunger that people have to kind of cross technology boundaries or if there's a real hesitation that people have. It's unclear to me. I'd love to know what you guys are seeing.

James Joyce: 25:12
I try to reframe the whole conversation to delivering innovation and not talking about the technology, but there's different paths to achieving innovation. Local development is absolutely a path that makes sense to incorporate into the overall kind of vision and there are other technologies that can be considered. But trying to avoid it being a technology first conversation but maybe talking about the methods of how you can achieve innovation. It's interesting because I started as an application developer. I joined AIS my company now as a senior software engineer and I remember being assigned to learn SharePoint back then.

James Joyce: 25:56
Sharepoint 2007, I think, had come out and there was a lot of conflict.

James Joyce: 26:00
I didn't really care, I was happy to learn it, but there was a lot of conflict around the pro developers who were like no, that's we do the hardcore stuff, like we're not going to touch that. That's not real development. I embraced it because I was just curious about it and I feel like when Power Platform came along, it was not the similar right, this like that's not real development. But we've seen a shift along the way where my personal, I guess, shift from being passionate about doing development to taking a step back and focusing more on clients and client engagements and client problems that we could solve was realizing that over the course of many, many years, I was just using different technology to solve the same problems, and the actual development work itself was kind of like this repeating cycle of I've done that before and I use this different technology, now there's another one that's solving the same thing. And I realized that, ultimately, the goal is not to build a cooler software in the world, it's to solve the problems that we're trying to solve for our clients.

Andrew Welch: 26:59
So true, I have conversations with my I do this whole sort of workshop with senior leaders, decision makers, execs, and the whole goal, right, is to help leaders of these organizations build an executive vision for where they're trying to take the cloud or where they're trying to take some subset thereof. I actually hate the subset business. I hate when it's oh, we're building a power platform strategy or an AI strategy or a data platform strategy. I much prefer the we're building a cloud strategy, because all these pieces are connected. But one of the things that comes out of that what I call guiding principles, right, so we talk a lot it's very free form about what's keeping you up at night, what are your hopes and dreams, what are you trying to achieve, and then we pull out of this. You know anywhere from three to five guiding principles.

Andrew Welch: 27:52
One of the things that I've noticed over the last couple of years is that there's about there's a menu of about 15 of these. Right, every organization is going to draw for the most part from this menu of 15, give or take. The most creative one that I recall was I worked with a big law firm and one of their guiding principles was keeping we must keep our partners out of jail. I thought that was a creative way of talking about risk reduction, but I think that really starts to get to the why are we doing this? And I'm curious what do you guys see out there as some of the greatest hits of the why right now? And keeping partners out of jail does not count that one's already been taken, so over to someone else.

James Joyce: 28:40
Let me clarify that question the greatest hits of good ideas or poor ideas, or both?

Andrew Welch: 28:46
Actually, I would love to know Give us two good and one that's going to make us hold our face in terror.

James Joyce: 28:58
This is the hold your hands in terror and cringe-y moment. I got into a habit of asking these questions. You know, working with Microsoft and sitting in a Microsoft MTC with a client that was invited in and I was the kind of the guest cloud, I don't know strategist in the room and you know clients coming in to learn about how to move forward with their cloud initiative in the room and clients coming in to learn about how to move forward with their cloud initiative and typically I like to take a step back and ask these questions about why are you doing this? What's the point of this? Why? And one time I asked that a few years back and the person that the client was sitting across the conference table and paused for a long time and dropped his head and it was like a long, uncomfortable moment and he eventually raised his head again and he goes. You know, we're just doing it because I was told to do it by our C-suite. We have no idea what we're doing.

James Joyce: 29:58
And I quickly had to kind of pivot to, I guess, kind of move on from, let's say, the embarrassment of him, I think, feeling that he had to admit this to look that's good, like it's okay that you don't have this clearly defined and that you're moving forward with this because you were told to just go do it and do cloud.

James Joyce: 30:21
I said because at least now we can well, knowing that we can shape up what that should be, and let's start talking about the benefits and the outcomes that we can achieve. And is it innovation? Is it agility you know, doing things more quickly, competing in a competitive market or is it secure? You know clients just recently had been hacked recently and really that was a key motivator to not let that happen to the organization again. Cost reduction used to be one, but, as we've seen, this rush to cloud or rush to doing cloud and not understanding that the users of cloud, the folks building and leveraging building solutions, leveraging the services have an impact on the cost and there's no cloud fin up strategy that anybody had considered, because that's not in your traditional IT org. Yeah, cost savings is a bit challenging if nobody has considered that either.

Mark Smith: 31:16
Well, with that we will wrap up this episode. James, it's been a pleasure to have you on it and get your insight. We look forward to getting you back on the next episode.

James Joyce: 31:25
Great. Thank you all. Great to chat with you today.

Mark Smith: 31:29
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 message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.