Leveraging Tech to Counter Living Costs: A Conversation with Mike Carlton

Mark Smith: 0:31
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. Today's guest is from the United Kingdom, in London. You can clarify that in a moment. He's a director at PWC. A piece of advice you'd give a 17-year-old self is do not be afraid to change something if it does not feel right. You only get one chance to do something in life and so therefore it's going to feel right. Otherwise, change it. You can find links to his bio in the show notes, social media etc. For this episode. Welcome to the show, mike.

Mike Carlton: 1:17
Thank you, mark, good to be here.

Mark Smith: 1:19
Good to have you on the show. Tell me, I always like to get to know my guests from a non-commercial perspective, in other words, non-career, non-business perspective. So for you, what does it mean? What does food, family fun mean for you?

Mike Carlton: 1:32
So I'll start with family. So I live in South Wales in the UK. So although I spend a lot of my time in central London, I actually live on the complete opposite side of the country, in the least technological part of the country that I possibly could do. I'm married, four children, which keep me really busy all the time, with three dogs including one dog which is 80 odd kilos in weight like a little horse, one cat, three tortoises and just before the pandemic we used to have 20 chickens that look like muppets. So we've got a little farmstead going on over there, let's put it that way. So about as non-technical as you could possibly get for my private life that makes sense.

Mark Smith: 2:15
How many acres have you got?

Mike Carlton: 2:17
It's not very much. We've got about an acre and a half just in the garden we keep lots of pets. It keeps us busy, it keeps my wife busy, keeps the kids busy and supplies us with lots of eggs Always helps, yeah, Although you'd be amazed at the cost of one of these eggs, because keeping your own chickens by the time you fed them, housed them, nurtured them, it's probably I'm probably paying about five pounds for a single egg. It's a bit ridiculous really.

Mark Smith: 2:49
I thought. I think we're at $1.10 at the moment in New Zealand for eggs because there's been a shortage and new rules around the way they're farmed et cetera have meant there's this massive shortage. Now They've all the laws have come in around them and I think at $1.10,. That's an expensive egg, especially when I make a lot of cocktails and I use egg whites in them quite a bit, so it just pops the price of the drink up, and that's not even the spirits.

Mike Carlton: 3:18
I imagine listeners to your podcast weren't expecting to have a small conversation about the price of eggs at the beginning, but it's there.

Mark Smith: 3:26
Exactly, exactly. What hobbies do you have?

Mike Carlton: 3:29
So I'm a big photography fan and doing a lot of traveling in the job that I do, I try and take the camera with me as much as I possibly can. I'm a big analogue photography fan so I'll often be seeing with one of these little single-use plastic film cameras that you can get for a few pounds and I'll grab those. No one's going to steal that. You're never going to get mugged with a plastic $4 camera if that makes sense. So I'll take that with me. And normally some of the best photos I've had of my team when we've been out and we've been doing whatever we've been doing with clients have always been from those little cheap plastic cameras. They all come in photos and of course no one does proper printed photos anymore. So there's a little novelty of handing these little things out and everyone's sort of taking their own. Yeah, it's a great fun.

Mark Smith: 4:21
But do you then have your more upscale? Do you have a, your Sony, or a Canon or a Nikon fan? What's your preference?

Mike Carlton: 4:31
I do so. I have all the possible configurations of Canon equipment, whether that be digital film, mirrorless, and I'll try and carry one of those with me. But do you know that the quality of the cameras on a phone these days is just amazing? And the fact that I can take a photo, upload it to Instagram, get it on all of my online content really quickly Just the workflow of that is fantastic. So I love doing a lot of that. If I'm not taking photos or traveling from work, I'm a big DIY nut, so anything in the home that I can fix myself or take four or five years to fix myself rather than pay for someone to do it over the course of maybe a day I'm there. I've got things unfinished throughout every part of my house and I'm so pleased with every single one of them, so do you have a lot of power tools? I'd like to think so, and most of them are used once and look amazing. Anything that's got sort of a big brand and maybe you can wear a tool belt with it. You have to have a tool belt on in order to use the tool. I'm there and I'll use it once, and I think you know what I now need something else. I need some form of other saw, drill, hammer, whatever it is. I'll get that and it drives my wife bananas because it will genuinely take me two or three years to put a shelf up or fix a door or any of those things. But it doesn't matter, I'm doing it myself. It's stimulating. It's not technology. It's a good outlet for the technology to pick up something analog and break something. It's great.

Mark Smith: 6:20
So you say you live in South Wales, is that right?

Mike Carlton: 6:24
It's correct. Yeah, so on the other side of the UK, from London.

Mark Smith: 6:28
What do you do about summer there? When I went to Wales on holiday and I just came straight from Portugal at the time and it was middle of summer. I got there. It was a wet, dreary day and I was like what's happened to summer?

Mike Carlton: 6:49
You know, if you go on holiday in Wales, you know most parts of the world, you can take your speedos and it's like your second skin when you're in the sea. It's fantastic In Wales. You know it's more like your second cardigan, if that makes sense. You know you need something warm and if you're going to go and pack, you know if you're a lady and you're packing your bikini, you're packing a cardigan, a set of Wellys and a waterproof. At the same time, we have our week of sunshine and what do you want? It's all about timing, eh.

Mark Smith: 7:22
It is.

Mike Carlton: 7:22
It is all about timing. You've got to go in June. In June it's fantastic, june is amazing. Rest of the year though yeah, it's pretty damn.

Mark Smith: 7:31
And so are you a native speaker.

Mike Carlton: 7:33
Absolutely not. No, I'm from Watford, I'm about as far removed from being Welsh as possible, but it's such a beautiful part of the world and you can. You know you can. Great thing is, I can walk my dogs, I can go out with the kids and within five minutes I can be up in the mountains and just seeing these most spectacular views. And, better still, you can get in a car and drive up to the top of the mountain and still experience these magnificent views without casting a single bead of sweat on your forehead. It's, it's fabulous, fabulous part of the world to live and at the same time, I can go into London hour and a half, I can be in the metropolis, I can do the thing that you need to do and then, hour and a half later, I'm back in the hills. I'm relaxed. It's just a wonderful existence. Yeah, yeah, exactly, it's just a wonderful existence, excellent, excellent.

Mark Smith: 8:28
Tell me about your career choice and what you do and how you got into what you currently do.

Mike Carlton: 8:36
So when I set out in my journey, if I'm honest, goat farming was was way more attractive than technology for me. It was sort of an industry that I fell into and started out as the most bizarre route into technology. So I actually started out running a business, got involved in doing a lot of technology delivery. Running that business ended up working in infrastructure and system engineering, sorting out servers and exchange infrastructure and active directory and TCP, ip and all that good stuff. Ended up delivering some some work with SharePoint. Found this thing called CRM. This was in back in the day of CRM three and four. This is. This is fantastic. I like this, I can. I reckon we can. We can do a lot with this. So got involved in doing a little bit of work with the CRM platform. Ended up going to work for a company called cyber. That was also happened to be the organization where the great and the good of the Microsoft community also working. So I was working with Scotch a row, andy Bibi and a whole bunch of others back in the day delivering CRM project. So CRM three, crm four 2011. Oh my gosh. What a what a time to be alive when we had workflows that you could edit without having to remote desktop into the server, it was spectacular. And then and then, of course, when Microsoft changed the all of the net classes, so you know, the billions of lines of code that we're all writing at the time all need to be refactored. That was a that was a high, high moment in the career, so ended up moving into software engineering where I spent probably most of my career writing software and writing writing applications. Four years ago I thought you know what I'm at. The I'm at about as far as I can go with technology. Why don't I try? Why don't I try leadership? Why don't I try and go and build a practice, get involved in the commercials? So I've been with them, with PwC, for four years now Big four organization, very, very different, working in that sort of environment, to the traditional sort of system integrator, and it's been a great challenge. And it's been a great challenge in the sense that I'm able to do what I love, which is deliver technology. But I'm able to do that where I've got all of these other disciplines that I can call upon. You know, behavioral analytics and model transformation, strategy, research, all of this stuff that I never, never had an opportunity to work with, and I can combine that with delivery technology and the rest is sort of sort of history. We've grown from strength to strength. We've come from a very, very small team in the UK now to a, to a power house in the UK firm. So I do miss Visual Studio. I do miss, you know, spending my days not in endless meetings but at the same time I recognize that in the job that I'm doing now I can empower so many other people to do all the things I found really interesting. On the other hand, and so.

Mark Smith: 11:34
so PwC is a business, I take it runs on a similar model to all the top four accountings where each country is autonomous in its own right and therefore the business, your practice, would sit in the UK. You're not doing projects into Europe, us, asia, anything like that. Or do you have like, for example, kpmg? They had that model but for their power practice. They kind of bought the strategic leaders together all around the world and then kind of set a operating model that all the great minds mainly you know a lot of them being Mbps and the such came together and really built that target operating model that they would use then when they went into the individual customers they work with. Are you working on a similar thing or are you totally unattached to the rest of the Microsoft business practices inside PwC worldwide?

Mike Carlton: 12:28
So it's a journey. So we have, globally, we have approximately 16,000 people with Microsoft certifications with, you know, proactively practicing the different territories globally or all at different stages with their Microsoft journey, I suppose you have to remind, like all the big four, because we have audit relationships with different technology practices. There's only we can't work with everyone. People can see it quite fortunate in that we can work with all the big ones and, as a result, we do, and because we do, we spend a lot of time almost with a bit of sort of Batman versus Superman. You know, is it dynamics, is it a source? There's an element of its sort of co-compepsy in the sense that they both do pretty much the same thing. You know, what cloud do you want, guys, you know. So, to answer your question, yeah, we do sort of work in that way. But you're absolutely right, every geography Is it zone, independent firm that collaborates in a network of firm. So when it comes to technology and technology implementation and technology choice, it really is down to the individual territory about how they want to roll these things out, but we all are dear to sort of a centralized and set of methodologies.

Mark Smith: 13:42
Yeah, and what you're doing day to day now with your customers. Are you seeing an index more strongly To dynamic implementations? And when I say dynamics 365, I'm talking about everything from the air piece out of things, including business central, through to the course, the range of products with sales, marketing, customers, service fields of us, etc. Where are you seeing a great index towards the power platform? And I'll preface my question is that I'm seeing that the seeding that Microsoft has done through the M365 licensing, whether it be the E3 of the five Cal, has definitely opened up a world of people, you know, building solutions on the power platform before they even really know what the power platform is. And similar to you know what we've seen in the past where, if you got access bundled with your office suite, all of a sudden you had a need for a database and see your built one right Excel. Similar what are you seeing in the market is because you know, I'm aware that in the UK Microsoft is just recently Knocked a bunch of dynamic sellers out of Microsoft on the head, you know. So it seems like they're pulling back in that market from a dynamics perspective, but I'm still seeing a massive index on the power platform side. What are you seeing?

Mike Carlton: 15:08
It's really is a really interesting question. So in this day and age where we've got cost of living crises all over the place and we've got everyone with a really keen eye on cost, there's a big sort of drive in a lot of the clients that we're working with around what can I actually do and how far can I go just using power platform? And then when does the cost benefit of spending capital cost in terms of building a solution in power platform, nurturing and maintaining it? When does that start and end? And actually the power of an off the shelf dynamics, product customer service, sales, etc. Etc. More so in the I'd say more so in the sea space, in the RPS. The RPS is pretty repeatable, it's pretty predictable, it's You're not going to replace any RPS platform overnight with power. With power you've got to. You got to recognize the horses for courses, if that makes sense. But certainly in C, customer service Is the one where everyone's like, well, come on, I can, I can build a power and I can push that power up to the end level. I'm having lots of conversations with clients that say, well, actually that's great, but what about when you want to do email to case? What about when you want to do Something with SLAs, what? When do you want to then start to use, sort of on the channel, all these other added value components? That's the point where your power app sort of starts and ends, but there's no reason why you can't continue to use the power of the power platform in combination with what you're delivering in dynamics. So I'm actually seeing farm or sort of I don't use the term hybrid but certainly more emphasis on what we got power platform data versus the base, and we've then got the first party apps that the sales, marketing, etc. Etc. For those specific use cases. We need it and actually we still want the power of power platform to allow us to solve a lot of the edge case problems that we would otherwise reach for excel or go and buy something off the shelf that might do 70% of what we actually need. Yes, there's a huge focus I think on, and there's a lot of untapped focus, I think, in people that have problems in the way in which they running their business. I always refer to those problems as sort of low value activity. You know, if you're a, you're a star for running a team of people. How can you make sure that your people can focus on high value activity, and high value activity for me would be the correct use of automation Having an app to do specific things that someone is manually doing, or someone is using a combination of different excel spreadsheets or not. Having access then to the first party apps to take huge sway, the functionality or huge way the story of problems away from people. Giving people the creativity sorry, giving people access to tooling that allows them to use their creativity in conjunction with those first party apps tends to be where people are at the moment. So I think it's a mix. I think you're right there is a shift to power platform. Platform is often the entry point, the starting point for something much bigger.

Mark Smith: 18:22
Are you seeing, across your customer base, customers coming to you that know that they need to invest in a low-code solution, and often it's app modernization is one of the driving things. Another thing that I see driving it is lack of visibility of solutions inside their business that have been built outside of IT and so we can take macro rich Excel spreadsheets and that we can take third party SaaS solutions that have been bought on your personal credit card because it solved the problem, right, not your personal credit. Your corporate credit card is automatically, and then the other one is surprisingly, there's still a proliferation of access databases that have been copied a thousand times and been forked as they went to different departments. And there's and what I'm seeing is that there's this risk to companies around one. If there's a ransomware attack on the business and you've got a database sitting on a shared whether you know network location, there's risk, right, that somebody sees that locks it down or leaks it. We had two major leaks in the Australian market last year where ransomware attack and they thought they would play hardball with the ransomware folks and the patient data was. Healthcare was one of them massive. It ended up people had to renew their passports and things because that type of ID identification, people's medical scenarios, or put on line, you know, imagine how much of a breach of trust that has been so. And then you've got low code, this concept of and you know, one of the questions is are we just providing a toolset that's just access on steroids, or Excel on steroids? How do you have those conversations that and and and, I suppose, show to particularly the security conscious folks and the admin folks inside organizations that they're not creating another lot of shambles that they have don't have their arms around?

Mike Carlton: 20:33
Really interesting question and, and I don't you know, for those of you remember the rise of SharePoint in the in the mid to late noughties, where everyone wanted a SharePoint site and all of a sudden you've got the Wild West of SharePoint, where documents are copied 20 times over and there's no records management chaos. There is a danger, I think, with with tools like Power Platform, that without the right level of governance in an organization, you can end up in that situation where you have absolutely no control. You know, someone's discovered the default environment and it all of a sudden there's flows everywhere, there's model driven apps here, there's Canvas apps there. It's chaos. We're certainly, certainly from our own journey. So as an organization, we use lots of different cloud technologies, power Platform being one of them. When we, when we were looking to roll out Power Platform, one of the key things that certainly we as an organization did and I think a lot of our clients are doing it almost in the opposite ways we wanted to make sure that the choice of using a tool like Power Platform was a business decision that has genuine material business value, not an IT decision that says, hey, we've got these licenses, we should use them to replace Excel. Now don't get me wrong. The IT aspect of it was definitely a driver to get away from situations where we've got lots of Excel spreadsheet scattered around. We've got isolated, isolated, highly business critical files that, as you say, can be open to ransomware attacks, can be open to data exfiltration, can be open to all manner of different vulnerabilities. Our decision was mainly around business and getting business value, and the business value for us was that we've got it's an interesting organization in that we have three scenarios that we would use Power Platform for. One is for internal tooling that allow staff to focus on high value activity, as I mentioned before. The second one would be engaging with our clients. So if you look at our tax line of service, for example, the way that tax tends to work is we gather a whole bunch of information from a client, we take it away, we do stuff with it, number crunch and we hand it back. When we do that, those sort of the tools that we would use to do that lend itself really well to Power Apps and Power Platform. And then the third scenario that we would have and this is probably unique to us is we want to build an asset that we can then reuse as an accelerator or as a piece of intellectual property that add value to client engagement. So we have three scenarios we do Power Platform for, and all three of those scenarios have a business lens associated with them, have a real strong business ROI that we contangibly measure and actually actively promote if that makes sense. So once we've got the business case and we've got buy-in from leadership and everyone's over the moon, power Platform's the right thing to do. We then get into the technology and how do we successfully roll out a tool set like Power Platform in a global enterprise where every territory has their own legal constraints, their own data rules, their own regulatory requirements? They have their own ways of doing things. Even how do we provide a global, consistent approach to managing the technology but still then provide the local technology teams with the right level of configuration to allow them to tailor the solution to their specific geography? And the one thing you know, that challenge has been huge. We've had everything from how do we choose even to use Power Platform? You know I've got 10 different cloud technologies. I can use Bendix, appian, power Platform. Which one do I go with? We've worked really hard to sort of identify the key strengths and key use cases for each of those tools and then to have a process where someone can submit an idea and we can take that idea and then start to evaluate what, just what, is the right tool set to use. And then, once you've chosen a tool set, what's the stack? What's that golden stack that we as an organization would, would focus on? Is it Dataverse driven model? Sorry, is it dataverse model driven apps? Is it dataverse and canvas apps? Is it sequel and a canvas app? Is it combination of all of them? It, you know what. What do we do? How do we provide some guidance? And then you know there's what? 800, 900 connectors. Now, how do we, how do we choose the? How do we grade those connectors in terms of risk? You know, how do we identify the connectors that someone can just use just here knock yourself out, you can use it versus connectors that will never see the light of day in an organization like like ours, if that makes sense, yeah, so we've graded all of the connectors, sort of red, amber, green. We've got a use case Evaluation tool so that when someone has an idea and they submit the idea and they talk about what you know, what's the sort of the architecture of the solution. How do I then choose which connectors you can use? If it's an amber connector, you know you need to make a business case for that, you need to justify why you're going to use that connector and Prove to us that, yeah, the choice of that connector isn't going to incur any, any kind of risk, if that makes sense. So so, just going back to your original question, you know I think it is a it had the choice of using a tool set like power platform has to be Driven by a business need, a business, a business requirement, a business outcome that's then empowered by the technology teams, and those technology teams Shape the way in which that technology is then rolled out to switch gears slightly.

Mark Smith: 26:30
Tell us about how you're from a people leadership perspective and in running a practice and a competency around. You know delivering outcomes to customers using Either the dynamic suite or the power platform suite of products. How do you assess individuals in your organization? And they're ongoing. You know our clients always expect us to be one step ahead of them, right? They they need to know, like, if they're gonna talk about something in the waiver lease, they expect the consultant to know about it, right? And how do you create a culture of Like what Microsoft has, of learn it all? Right, that you need to be constantly learning, and I don't know what your thoughts are on certification, but, of course, as a Microsoft partner, microsoft Pretty much in sense their partners to be certified and go through, to some degree, a box ticking exercise with that. But how do you make sure that your consultants, however you take them on or whatever stage you take them on in their career, are going to the next level that at the end of a year they haven't just gained? Like you know, because I see so many consultants and I see so many CVs come across my head and what they show me is no Personal development. Yeah, I learned this on the project because the customer had a need and I'm like you're like a rudderless ship. You just go whatever you've got something to do here. So you learn that and there's no kind of I just see, you know, if you were a doctor in a medical profession and you're making money at the level of a doctor, you have ongoing Education, like you know where your career is going. You know, yeah, if you're gonna Drill deeper in this, you, it's not a case of now I'm just doing the next job and yet I'm seeing so many consultants coming through with this absolute lack of Career direction because there's a shortage of resources in the market. They are just bumping. They want another 10 grand on what they're making and they know that they're never gonna get it. They're current employer and, like most employers, as in particularly at the high end of the market that we operate in, they do not Give pay rises without Somebody giving up a heart or a lung or something like that in the management team to make that a reality. So therefore, they know, okay, we, what we do. We've got to switch companies, and so they switch company and they get these bland CVs come to me and I'm just like I don't even want to employ you because it just shows you're kind of epic, your You've got no control of your career, you're just in it to. You know, basically go and eat your lunch and get your paycheck, and I don't see this kind of career vision and stuff and I don't know, should I be expecting it, or do people not care these days? How do you deal with that as a as a leader?

Mike Carlton: 29:17
really interesting question and and and and I can relate to just about everything you said from from my my time in the system integration market, where you know you're, the focus is on you being utilized and you being billable and you being You're basically doing whatever the client is coming up with and there's virtually no incentive for you to have any kind of self-development, Whether that be from a technology standpoint how do I learn about all the new stuff coming through? How do I keep myself up to date? But also from a personal development. You know, how do I respond to feedback, how do I measure my effectiveness against that feedback that I've had? You know, I might be Really quiet, I might not speak out, I might not be very good at managing risk, I might not have the right sort of approach to presentation, I might speak really quickly or I might speak really. So how am I responding to People's feedback and how am I being measured against that? So I think when, back in the day, when, when I was in the in the system integration space, you know your training would be hey, go buy the book, We'll pay for the exam, Study it in your own time, knock yourself out, go to a conference and and go, and you know, Go to the community conferences on the weekend, go and go to one of the Microsoft events, go and listen to the training. Training and certifications to think are an essential, but at the same time I don't think they necessarily mean you Immediately know how to use what you've been taught. They're quite generic, you know, and I think the further up the food, the food chain you get and the further the with the experience that you have, you find that actually you can pass the exams Pretty easily from just watching the, the trainer video, Of course, of a couple of days before the exam, if that makes sense. So for me, I I think working for a big four organization, big four organizations have a very different approach to in my experience anyway, from what the system integrates us tend to do. So in big four organizations there's an enormous focus on you being a leader and you, regardless of the grade that you come in at, you know, regardless of if you're at the beginning of your career or right at the top of your career, there's a huge focus on you leading, driving and very much big four organizations. They're organizations built in relationships. So when I'm bringing people in, I'm looking at 60% of their skills need to be aimed at technology. You need to understand the product. You need to understand the capabilities of it. You need to be kept up to date. You need to know how to translate a client's problem into a solution using that technology. You need to be able to shape and understand. Do I use dynamics? Do we use power platform? Do I use case management? Do I use sales? Do I use a combination of sales? You need to understand the problem you're solving. You need to understand the context that you're trying to solve the problem. You need to understand the bigger picture of the client's problem domain their industry, the way in which that industry works. The focus is that and the pressures that that client may have. And when I'm looking for people, I'm looking at, as I say, 60% of their skills to be in that technology space, then 40% of their skills to be how do you go about building a relationship with someone? Because, let's face it, consulting you're always sort of I used to use this phrase, it's terrible but always selling, in the sense that you're always presenting, you're always on stage, you're the lead singer and you're only as good as your last song and you have to constantly be thinking about okay, what is this person that I'm presenting to thinking, what are their problems? How do I need to solve those problems? And then the wider picture of okay, this person is about to invest a significant amount of money into a project and I might be a leader on that project, or I might be someone delivering as part of the project. There might be someone that's just literally building power behind Ashdorff's All Day, or someone that's building flows. Every member of that team has a role to play in providing value to the client, providing value in what they do, and that might be as basic as someone comes up to them when they're delivering a solution, ask them a question, someone from the customer or even a team member. How is that person then responding? Because there's a balance there of you are providing internal consultancy to your colleague and that colleague might not know about the technology that you're using. How do you foster and share ideas? Equally, you might be providing a solution to your customer. That customer may have never seen any of the technology that you're using ever, and you might start using terms like oh yeah, we put a solution in for that and I've got a table for this and a field for that they have no idea what you're talking about, and the quicker you realize that and recognize that and understand how to engage with someone in a meaningful way, the better. So 40% of the skills that I'm looking for are those true consultancy skills, the personal skills, the interpersonal ability to build relationships and be confident and credible when having a conversation with someone and not be what's the word not be necessarily I was going to say introverted, but it's not the term. It's not be sort of like you don't know the answer, say you don't know the answer. Go and find out. You're the consultant. Go and improve yourself. Don't be scared to definitely do not just make something up and hope for the best, because hope is not a plan.

Mark Smith: 34:53
Yeah, exactly, mike. It's an interesting conversation. We've already run out of time, as in, and I feel like there's a lot more I'd like to discuss with you, but thank you so much for coming on the show.

Mike Carlton: 35:03
You're very welcome. It's good to be here, thank you.

Mark Smith: 35:07
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.