Growing Centers of Enablement Excellence with Simon Owen

[Mark Smith]: 6:58
In this episode, we're going to be focusing on successfully growing a center of enablement within the Power Platform. Today's guest is from Surrey, England,that lovely place I used to live at some time ago. In fact, the guest that I'm interviewing today was one of my last interviews before I left England to move back to New Zealand. He's the group manager of the Global Power He has done a lot of work over the years in the Power Platform, one of the originals getting into the space. You can find links to his bio in the show notes for this episode. Actually check out his latest blog posts around establishing centers of enablement. Welcome to the show, Simon.

[Simon Owen]: 7:45
Yay! Hi Mark, really good to be talking again. It's so long since that original session we did, isn't it? It's so exciting to look back on that.

[Mark Smith]: 7:57
It's crazy how time has flown.It was episode, let me see here, episode 160that I did with you and I just published episode 457 this morning. So there's been a bit of a gap between there and there.

[Simon Owen]: 8:17
Things have changed.

[Mark Smith]: 8:18
it's been a while. It's been a while.

[Simon Owen]: 8:18
They've changed a lot.

[Mark Smith]: 8:23
Absolutely. Last time I spoke to you, you're working at GSK at the time.You're now obviously gone from,you know, that was customer side. You're now what we'd say, partner side with Avanade. Give us a bit of an update. You've moved around a bit. Tell us a bit about food, family and fun and what that means to you and where you're placed at the moment. All the things that you do when you're not writing blog posts or thinking about the Power Platform.

[Simon Owen]: 8:46
Yeah, so a lot's changed. I think we worked out that it was maybe 2019 that we last spoke, something like that. So a lot's happened in that time.So as you said, I was at GSK, I was leading adoption and helping lead establishing the governance and guardrails for the platform there. And like a load of big organizations, they were constantly going through some kind of restructuring and redundancy. And I managed to poke it off with a stick for a little while, but actually the time came where I wasn't really sure how much longer I had in the power platform there. I delivered a lot of what I set out to do. I'd put the guardrails in place, I'd designed the process around that. I'd grown this huge user community of four and a half thousand people across 70 plus countries, all levels of the organization, got some real senior buy-in and recognition. And I was thinking, oh, what comes next? I don't really know. And one of these rounds of redundancies came up. I thought,actually, I think it's time. I'd been there for 16 years, but I thought, well,I think it's time for a change. So yeah,put my feelers out, started to connect to some of those wonderful people across the network and spoke to Mr. Huntingford. And as a result of that connection,moved to Avernard and it's been nearly two years now that I've been here.In August it'll be two years.So that's one big change that's happened. Also moved home, so I used to be in Cambridgeshire, I'm now down in Surrey, I'm living with my girlfriend, my partner Juliet, her 14 year old son William.We've got two dogs, we've got a cat, we've got about 15 chickens. Life's really good, it's really fun.

[Mark Smith]: 10:47
How much land do you own?

[Simon Owen]: 10:49
Not a lot, actually, but we've got a pretty good size garden and there's a chicken run at the bottom where they can all kind of congregate and do their thing. Yeah, so every morning we're out collecting some eggs and feeding them, watering them,and then usually poached eggs for breakfast.You can't get any better poached eggs than a fresh chicken.

[Mark Smith]: 11:13
yeah. Mm-hmm. I love that. It's one thing I haven't got to yet. I'm gonna put chickens in at the moment I've got a massive wind issue in that, you know I get wind straight off the ocean and so I've got to put some wind protection in before I get chickens I reckon they get blown to bits otherwise

[Simon Owen]: 11:32
Yeah, sounds wise. I wasn't sure if you meant dietary wind there.

[Mark Smith]: 11:42
No, no, I'm talking about the, you know, we get up, we get up to some like 90k wind straight off the ocean.So yeah, it can get pretty intense at times. And the animals don't like it so much. I got two cats and they don't mind it. They can escape inside. So anyhow,let's get on with what we want to talk about today, which is successfully growing centers of enablement excellence. I will quite happily use here as well, being that we're starting to see a pivot in the market around not just making sure that you get the governance and the guardrails and things like that in place, but also that you really enable people to do more with the technology and really as I say, a rising tide floats all boats. It's like in this technology area, if everybody can learn to become digitally literate within the organization,everybody benefits. Careers benefit from it, people's work benefits from it. And of course we can come up with some crazy cool new ideas on how to make business more streamlined and productive.Tell me on your journey from your first exposure to where you are now, How has your thinking changed around how do you scale the power platform inside an organization?

[Simon Owen]: 13:08
I think that's a really good question.So when I started this journey, well, actually when I started, it was entirely accidental. So I was part of a big digital transformation program. I was the IT lead on that. And one of the work streams that we had, we were looking at a solution where across this factory environment, all levels of the organization, they had these daily meetings. and they would use those meetings to look at metrics,make decisions, and then take away actions.And then they would come back the next day and then they would give updates on those things. So we had a goal to digitalize that process and Microsoft came in and they said, oh, well, we think that Power Platform is the right platform for you. We can put loads of different components and some of them can be graphs and some of them can be forms and some of them can display data. So we started off down that route with this team helping us develop something in the Power Platform. Now it turned out to be a complete catastrophe, unfortunately.And I think Power Platform was such a young technology at that time that nobody quite understood the scale of what we were trying to deliver. And actually it wasn't ready for what we were trying to do. However, the silver lining on that was that Actually, they brought in Laura Gray and Brown to help us on resolving some of these issues.And Laura is amazing. She's one of my best mates now, also now working at Avanade as well. And through that connection,she really opened my eyes to what the Power Platform was and to the community that's wrapped around it. She was the one that first introduced me to folks like Keith Watling. So in those very early days, we didn't really have any guardrails, we didn't have any governance on the platform. I was trying to steer people to do the right thing,but I was also trying to encourage as many people to get out there and experiment as possible. It felt like it was this really exciting technology. Didn't quite know how to use it, where to use it, who to use it, how they should go about learning it. But that North Star for me was trying to enable people to do something that they couldn't do yesterday,or maybe that they couldn't even believe that they could do today. So I think that part has been a constant for me over the last four or five years. That's always been my goal. It's always been that people side. Now, what I've understood as my knowledge and experience has grown. is how to then think about the governance that you wrap around it. How do I set up the platform to keep people safe,but actually give them that space to go out there and experiment, go out there and innovate, go out there and make a difference, and then grow their experience,grow the guardrails so that it flexes with them and enables the right things to be done by the right people at the right time, in the right place.

[Mark Smith]: 16:26
I like it. I like it. Tell me,tell me though, um, without having the governance,et cetera, that you talked about back in those days, was there any implications of that?

[Simon Owen]: 16:38
Yeah, there was. I caused a lot of chaos, I must admit. So we started with about eight people in our little gang that came together.And we met and shared what we'd learned, shared some of the problems that we'd had, shared some of the successes.And we started to grow that group. And as I said, we got up to four and a half thousand people by the time I left. Now,with no, it wasn't no governance,but not... the level of governance that we needed. There were connectors available to us that maybe shouldn't have been.The key one probably being SQL. Now, at the time, you'll remember that it used to be a standard connector back in the day. So we came up with this use case to help with the health and safety problem of logging near misses. So if I saw something that might hurt somebody, I took a photo, I gave it a description,I scored it, I categorized it. I might have identified some actions and then I would use the system to keep me honest and close those actions out and then re-score what it had got to. So we thought SQL feels really good for that.There's no additional licensing cost. It's nice and scalable. We built a product team around it and partway through rolling that out to multiple locations,we'd rolled it out to maybe... 5,000 users,6,000 users by that stage, Microsoft changed the model. So then it became this premium license.It became this huge financial risk for us as the enterprise agreement came to an end. So that, and coupled with encouraging thousands of people to start making apps, start making flows.meant that we had a hell of a lot of stuff in the default environment that needed migrating into somewhere a bit more controlled and safer. So that, I left July-ish two years ago, they've just got to the stage where all of the chaos that I caused is now back in the box, it's conforming to the environment strategy,everything's nice and under control.So they're in a really good place.

[Mark Smith]: 18:59
Nice, nice. In coming into accounts,you know, now that you're partner side and you come in, and you know, you might get onboarded to a new customer in the enterprise space and they have not been doing anything around governance,they've not doing anything around establishing a maker community. They're not being doing anything around that.You come in and let's say they've had license,you know, for everybody on the network or even E3. And so you've got those seeded licenses of power automate,power apps, et cetera, being deployed through the organization. When you take stock, what's the process that you go through in your mind to go, okay, let's understand the baseline of what we're dealing with. And then I wanna unpack your thought processes then how you move forward from that point. So let's start with you're assessing a new account, a new customer for the first time. What's the kind of process you go through? What's your thinking?

[Simon Owen]: 20:01
Yeah, that's a really common scenario.So since I've joined Avanade, I've been involved with, I don't know, 20, 30, 40different customers, either looking at putting some guardrails in and center of excellence. Or more recently, as you described at the beginning, the market's starting to pivot, and now there's more about enablement and adoption.But those COE conversations, they generally follow the same kind of theme.So question one is, well, have you got the COE starter kit installed? If you haven't, let's help you put it in. If you have, when did you last update it? Let's help you put the more up-to-date version in so we get the full benefits of it. And those Power BI reports are like the Bible for those kickoff meetings.So what we tend to do is to have a look at what's going on. Let's have a conversation around what's in place. What do we see from your visuals? And let's see how what's the problem that we need to solve. And in a lot of cases, that problem is maybe not as extreme as I described it. in my old world, but there's often X number of environments that have been created because they may have or may not have turned off the ability for people to create those environments. There's always a number of apps, a number of flows. Occasionally there's some pages or PVA's or whatever, but usually there's something that needs addressing. Now, what we would often then do. is to start thinking, well, OK, well, how do we address that? What do you want to achieve?What's the levels of governance that we want to try and put in? Let's design what that future state needs to look like. So the way that I tend to have that conversation, and I've been sharing out across Avanade over the last couple of years, is the same kind of model that I designed and I put into place at GSK.What we wanted to do there was to have a world where actually if something's low risk and low complexity, it's quite simple. Maybe it's just building on top of a SharePoint list or possibly Excel, something like that low risk means we shouldn't be too worried about it.They're the types of problems that people are already solving today. They're solving them in Excel. They're solving them in SharePoint. We,we, we don't need to be too concerned depending on how they're using that. Whereas if something is, is super complicated or it's used by tens, hundreds of thousands of people across an organization, we need to treat those with a bit more respect.If you're starting to use those enterprise data systems, need to look after those. We need to make sure you're doing the right thing. So we need to look after that stuff with care. So we have that.kind of conversation to describe what that spectrum of governance might look like and how we describe things across that spectrum. Then we can start to design. So once we've got those levels that we've split that into, we think,well, what was the environment strategy that sits underneath that? So something at the real simple end. Perhaps I'm okay using default environment for something like that.Something that's more experimental, shared with two or three people, only using office connectors.Something like that. I'm probably okay with default on that sort of thing. But if you're sharing it with thousands of people and it's used multiple times per day, it's connected to something premium, we need to think about that. We need to probably adopt those IT best practices. maybe have our environment strategy set up like we would do with our servers. Have a dev QA prod, implement ALM processes, have a support model wrapped around it. So we can help describe the environment strategy in that way and think about the granularity of controls or complexity in how we manage it. We can do the same with the DLP policies and define what would be made available at that low risk end. How are we going to manage things at the higher risk end?And then we can think about all of the other processes in exactly the same way. Are there some that sit across every solution in the same way? Are there some where we can be more lenient at one end and need to be more careful at the other end? Once we've gone through that design process, we can then start implementing that structure and then help with that migration process. So moving things out. of the default environment into that new world, into that controlled world.But that can take a hell of a long time sometimes, because if we think about a DLP policy, or imagine there was no DLP policy, so you've got all sorts of stuff in default to start with.By moving that app out, yeah, OK, if it's one app using that one connector.Great, I can move that and then I can remove it from a DLP policy on the default environment. Nobody else can touch it again then, unless I want them to. But if there's20 apps using that connector, I've got to have20 conversations. I've got to move all of those apps into the new world or decommission before I can put that control in place. So it can be really complicated.

[Mark Smith]: 25:43
Yeah, yeah, totally, totally.Just play forward. What's, so once you've got that, now it's interesting you said it can take a long time. And I know that this is relative, my question,but are we talking months? Are we talking three,six, nine months to get that kind of stabilized system in place where you've basically bedded down and go,you know what, the foundations are in now,now we can actually build from it. How would you answer that?

[Simon Owen]: 26:14
Yeah, it really does depend. But if we're talking hundreds of apps and flows, then we're probably talking kind of high number of weeks, medium to high number of weeks. If it's a real concerted effort to get into control. If we're talking thousands, single,single level thousands is starting to get into the months and, and if there's lots of thousands, well then, then you're probably talking a year plus, depending on the size of the challenge.

[Mark Smith]: 26:43
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.Tell me about, if you were looking at the maturity model of somebody that an organization that had deployed the Power Platform, and I'll just explain what I see, and then perhaps you can give your lens on it. So I see organizations that have made a commitment to the Power Platform, and all their head architects are on board,they're involved, and they see a strategy,a multi-year strategy. Moving forward with the technology what happens then is that they go okay? Let's get the governance in place They want to get all that kind of sorted out better down Especially you know consider these type of clients that not necessarily done much yet Yes, they've got a few of those apps kicking around that people have built through self-discovery You know of those you know through the licensing that they had the seeded license But then I see kind of a fork happen And I want to validate if you're seeing the same thing. So the fork is this one, the company goes, you know what?We don't want makers or citizen developers doing it. You know, where are we're a bank or where, you know, security is so important and we don't see the power platform as enterprise enough,right? And so I get these conversations and then you get the other one, the fork, then the other side is, listen, we're going to set up teams of people.and they're going to build apps or let's say solutions, let's not just talk about apps, but solutions for the company on the power platform. But you know,the business needs to come, bring the business case, et cetera, and we'll decide based on our backlog, what gets built. And so I see these that kind of fork happen. And then you get other organizations that go, no, all in, let's, let's get the governance in place. But then we really want to enable the makers. But we also want this kind of a factory software factory where, you know, literally thousands of solutions are built by a team of people that are not, that are really a team of skill sets. So we're talking about change, manner, you know,change or adoption, folks in that team, full product and project management,we're talking about, you know, business analysts,architects, developers, the whole uh, you know, UI UX, uh, experts coming in and making part of that team.That's a kind of the landscape that I find myself in quite a bit. What, what do you see and, and where do you see, you know,those kind of the paths of maturity on the power platform and the customers that you've worked with.

[Simon Owen]: 29:25
Yeah, I see something quite similar a lot of the time. So when an organization comes to us, now that we're talking to more folks about adoption, enablement, because they've got those guardrails in place, they've got that level of safety and security and confidence in the platform, now they're looking to move forward. So what I'd like to say is that, you know,we're not going to be able to do that. What I've noticed is that often, so often the conversations we have will be from the citizen developer end, which is really interesting.So it tends to come, I think that licensing is still a complexity and a barrier to people. So certainly the organizations that I work with are generally tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people. So they're big, big organizations.

[Mark Smith]: 30:18
Correct.

[Simon Owen]: 30:19
So for them to jump in and decide to go all in on licensing across their organization,even if they got an amazing discount,they're still talking big investment to do it across their whole organization year on year. And that budget

[Mark Smith]: 30:35
Totally.

[Simon Owen]: 30:36
hasn't been isolated at that point in time. They're not 100%sure on the value of the platform or the solutions that they're gonna be able to build. So often that... we'll start talking about the citizen developer end and use that as a mechanism, say, well, look,we've got these tools that actually there's all these stories out there. People are changing their processes, they're changing their lives and how their careers are progressing.They're changing organizations with those tools.Let's start low risk, low cost,experimental. and start helping identify, well,who are those folks that could start going on this journey? Let's use them to start experimenting with the platform and showing you what value means.And maybe we can talk a bit more about value in a minute through those lenses.And then once that starts to grow,those folks, so you've got people. coming in the bottom end with no experience all the time. So they're solving those small problems. They're gaining that experience. But you've got those folks at the top end as well who are really looking to push the boundaries. They're really excited by the platform. They wanna do more, they wanna do faster, they wanna do more complex,solve bigger problems. And they're the folks that start to then hit across, hit up against this lack of premium licensing. So... What I often then see is there's a bit of activation energy needed, that if they've got no premium licenses initially, then they need some, they need to do some experiments.So they decide maybe it's hundreds,maybe it's a couple of thousand, but they need some licenses to go out there.And then they're very targeted about doing a discovery with those parts of the business where they think the biggest value will be. finding those use cases that fit nicely on the power platform, their high value at this stage, their low risk. They want to go out there and use the premium licenses to explore whether that financial return, that financial value comes back. And that continues to grow for a period. But then you reach another period of activation energies that's needed. So then decide, well, I've proven value. I know the capabilities of the platform. I can see where it would fit in my strategy as a capability I want to build and leverage across the IT organization especially. How do I then make a decision to say, well, let's go all in? I've got enough in my backlog,enough big use cases that I want to move forward and go off down that fork and make sure that I've got licensing for the whole organization.Those are the kind of three phases almost that I see and sometimes they happen in parallel sometimes they happen from both ends Sometimes they go through those Lifecycle phases in that way Every organization is a little bit different, but they all seem to touch on those three areas

[Mark Smith]: 33:50
Do you find, as getting that buy-in,you know, and that license story, because yeah,it is frustrating when, for me,it's frustrating not working with premium,you know, because it just, it reduces the choices and the thinking and the complexity of what you can do.But where does executive stakeholder engagement come into the play in that for you?

[Simon Owen]: 34:20
So for me, it's being able to show them value. Usually it's not something that's coming right from the top down as a strategic decision.Actually, there's a lot, I was reading just before we spoke actually about product led growth and I realized.That's essentially what I've seen a lot of over the last few things. So there's a lot of bottom up, put the tools in people's hands so that they can start demonstrating value early. They become stronger and stronger advocates and they influence their leaders to show them what the potential value is if they can unlock that licensing piece. So there's a piece I think around, it's great if you can go in at the top level and they get the strategy, they get the vision, they're bought in. and then it all comes top down. But in my experience, that's not often how these conversations tend to go. So being able to prove value at different levels of the organization in different ways and really getting the visibility at that top level of the organization is a much easier way, it's a longer, but easier way to then justify or help influence that decision and show them where it fits.

[Mark Smith]: 35:44
Yeah, yeah. Switching to the other end of the conversation then, and I like that idea of putting the hand, the tools in the hands of the people and let them,you know, learn them and then they influence up. How do you systematize that in any way as in making sure like,let's say a brand new fresh person inside an organization discovers. this concept of app making or automation and how do you take somebody from that level in a systematized way and take them to a level of being able to produce something that the organization can use. And if I was to relate this into Excel terms,I would say it would be somebody that you know has, they know what Excel can do and then they start learning about Excel formulas, right? And then they start going, hey, I can write macros and then. all of a sudden they've built an app for the company in Excel and it's become mission critical. How do you replicate that for the Power Platform? Taking people from wherever they are, expertise-wise,to a level and a competence and a confidence level where they are really adding value to the organization.

[Simon Owen]: 37:04
Yeah, I have got a system for that, actually.When I was back in GSK, I essentially,well, let's call it agile,to be favourable. But if I was being unfavourable, I would say, well, I kind of made it up as I went along.It was a very experimental

[Mark Smith]: 37:22
Right.

[Simon Owen]: 37:23
approach. I saw patterns of things that seem to work, and I did more of those.I tried some other things and they might not have worked, so I did less of them.And what I did over that period of two or three years, and then coming into Avanade and thinking more from a systemic perspective, and how do I open those doors to other organisations and help them follow the same path? I distilled that down into a systematic way that I can... I can then have that conversation.I can open those doors. I can encourage people. So it's something that I've been, everything needs a bit of a cheesy name, doesn't it? So I've been calling it the maker movement.And essentially it doesn't matter where somebody is on their capability level.Let's say that they're those folks who already know about the Power Platform.If we looked at our list of makers,they've found the platform by by accident,by happy accident. They've gone off, they've started experimenting,they've started building things. So we need to understand those folks. If they've built multiple things, well, there's some advocacy there. There's some enthusiasm, there's some excitement. Let's just have conversations with them,understand, well, how did you find it? What went well, what didn't go well? How did you learn it? Where did you get information from? What can we do to help you do even better? And using those kinds of conversations,we can then start sharing that people with, sharing that with other people.So if we start putting that stories out and start promoting the successes that these folks have had, not just in what they've been making,but the approach that they've taken and how they've owned their own development,how they've done something special, they've been a bit brave, they've solved some business problems. If we can promote those behaviors, those qualities, Other people tend to follow. So I've been reading a book, well, a series of books recently about viral change. And it's essentially about that. It's about those ways that we work out in the real world, trying to bring them into the corporate environment. So something like new restaurants opened just down the street. All my friends have been raving about it. Mark, you told me about the amazing chicken that they had. It was the best chicken you've ever had. So immediately I'm influenced. I want to go to that restaurant because everyone's raving about it. I'm probably going to choose the chicken because you've been such an advocate for it.It's that kind of behavioral change and those kind of techniques that we can use to help people on that journey.So if we then expand that, so that's somebody at the beginning of their journey or early on.Those next people that come into the funnel, well, If they need a bit of help,let me connect them to those people who are a step or two up the ladder. They're not super technical, but they're further ahead. They can be that guiding hand that shows people how they did it, how they learned, how they solved some of the problems. And we can keep extending it in that way. So by nurturing people,especially at that top level of capability. and keep stretching them, keep giving them access to perhaps a little bit more than everybody else because they've proven themselves, they've proven their mindset, they've proven their safety. We can keep moving them up the ladder and bringing them along and then keep nurturing the tail of that as well to keep bringing people through the system and help people along that way. So that's how we can use a community to help build all that capability. as well as having some more structured systems in place as well.

[Mark Smith]: 41:13
Yeah, yeah, I love it. I'd love to unpack this more, but I see that we're out of time. Maybe we'll do a round two, Simon, and explore a bit more your thinking in this area.

[Simon Owen]: 41:25
Sounds great. Yeah, definitely up for that.

[Mark Smith]: 41:27
Hey, thanks for coming on the show.

[Simon Owen]: 41:30
You're welcome. Great to speak to you Mark.