Mastering Ecosystem Dynamics & Emerging Technologies - A Deep Dive into Strategic Pyramid Implementation and the Power of Governance

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. Hey, welcome to the ecosystem podcast. Today we are joined by the missing link Sorry he isn't here. The guy that's usually the boring one on the show, chris Huntingford, decided that he needed a Nanna nap and so he couldn't make it today. So instead of him kicking off the show and doing the introduction, anna, why don't you take things away?

Ana Demeny: 1:08
Hi, thanks, hi everyone. We're really happy to be here today again. I think today we're going to continue talking about the strategic pyramid, just to talk a bit about what that is. I don't know, andrew, if you want to share your screen or if you can share your screen. This is a concept where we're trying to explore how technology works and how companies look at it. So if you look at the strategic pyramid and how we find the actual platform ecosystem and ecosystem architecture to be related to this, you'll see that the strategic pyramid is really a concept that looks at various layers of depth when it comes to implementing business applications, and not just that, so the whole Microsoft Cloud. Last time, we talked about implementing workloads a lot. So what we said was that implementing workloads is not really an easy thing. It doesn't just mean creating a set of a PowerApp or a set of PowerApps. Implementing workloads can actually mean implementing quite complex projects that have a lot of elements but that are still potentially missing some pieces. So in our maturity level here, I think today we're going to go to the second layer of the strategic pyramid and this is creating the conditions for success. So whatever we were talking last time is what a lot of the Microsoft partners are still implementing at the moment. They are looking for quick wins. They are looking for projects that they can just quickly map onto business applications it being Power Platform or Dynamics or ERP, whatever their specialty is and then trying to just deliver that to their customers. What we're saying is that, on top of implementing workloads, we must create a set of conditions for success. We've been talking for a long time now about governance, about ALM, about full-time architecture when it comes to business applications and the Microsoft Cloud. I guess the next step in our maturity model and what people should be doing next, we believe, would be creating conditions for success. Then in our next episode or in the following episodes, we're going to talk a lot about building a platform ecosystem and finally creating strategic foundations for our technical systems. Nowadays, this is all in service of artificial intelligence and technological waves and us actually building interesting work. It also relates a lot to a big point that we raised last time, which was it's all well and good to keep implementing workloads I've even heard the term lift and shift just this week still but make sure that your specialty isn't just there, because at the rate that co-pilots are moving these days, it's very likely that people are going to find, and companies are going to find, little value in your own skills of implementing workloads. So bit of a long introduction, but here we are. We are boring you today with creating conditions for success.

Mark Smith: 5:43
I like it, andrew. So, if we're going to drill down to that second layer today, what are your thoughts on it? Because I see, although we talked about the top layer, as a lot of partners are in that space, what about that second layer down? I believe a lot of partners are actually playing there as well, but it's one of those ones that are ultimately going to become more AI-centric or managed or run in time. What are your thoughts?

Andrew Welch: 6:04
Yeah, so remember that part of the reason that we like this model of the pyramid is that as we get closer to the top of the pyramid, we find that that's where more of the talent in the industry lives. More of the talent in the industry is focused on implementing workloads and creating the conditions for success than say, on platform ecosystems today. We think that'll change and we hope that changes the same with the accessibility of these sorts of activities to AI technologies, right? So listen back, I'm going back in my mind to 2019. And back then, I think that was the beginning of Microsoft partners and technology practitioners and also customers starting to think about hey, maybe we should be focused a bit more on conditions for success than on just implementing the workload, right? So for several years, this has really been dressed up in the language of governance, right? So I've said recently that we're the big change right now is that we're moving from governance to strategy, and there's a lot wrapped up in that, and I think this is what we're going to really pick apart today, right Is how much of creating the conditions for success is governance versus enablement, and there's a big difference there, even though everyone seems to be really obsessed with governance still, but, frankly, those are table stakes. It's time to move on. It's time to diversify a bit. Yeah, yeah, we got it Governance. If you don't have it, though, you're cooked, you're done. End of conversation. So that's, I think, where we're jumping off from today.

Ana Demeny: 7:45
Yeah, yeah, I think so, and in my opinion, that's a really, really great point you raised there, because creating conditions for success is not just about governance. In fact, from my experience working with partners, a lot of them have problems with application life cycle management. I don't know if you guys have this experience, and how did we get there and how are people trying to solve this issue right now?

Andrew Welch: 8:22
I was just going to say let's bring this back really quickly. Let's bring our venerable graphic back for a second and just level set everyone. So, when we think about the conditions for success, what we're really thinking about is five pillars of work, and they are you can see them here, but for those who are just listening to the podcast, they are platform management, enterprise architecture, application life cycle management or ALM, the mature security model and user and organizational empowerment. So these and we can pull the string on each of these but ALM, which I think includes the discipline of actual proper ALM and DevOps best practices, but also includes some of the technical capabilities around pipelines and source control and how we deploy and manage workloads and technical services. So these could be apps, these could be dynamics, apps and modules, but they could also be infrastructure services. Say, infrastructure is code from a pure Azure infrastructure perspective. So, yeah, alm is definitely a big part of this, but those are the really the five key pillars here of what we're talking about.

William Dorrington: 9:40
One thing I would say is this is a part of the pyramid, which I've definitely read the paper now, so it's part of the pyramid that I think has the most confusion around it. And what I mean by that is, as soon as you say creating conditions for success or creating governance models, people go yeah, yeah, yeah, but I've got a COE. But they say something else. They say something that really and we're going back to what was it, anna, you said you have beef with it and I would say it grinds my gears, which is people. When you say, do you have a COE, they say this beautiful thing, which is, yes, I've installed it. You know what have you installed? And because Microsoft is so good at marketing and Manuela's team has done such a brilliant job at marketing their proposition for this, whenever they think of COE, they just assume it's their tool, which is the COE start kit, and whenever they start thinking about creating conditions for success, they think about the governance and the tooling, rather than the entirety of the enablement or all the rest of the security goes with it, all the rest of the enablement factors that go along it. It's not just about the tooling itself, but it enables the rest. So sorry, just going on a bit of a frustrated point there, because I've had this conversation this week which is what's your foundational layer of success? You know, whatever you enabled, what's your COE look like, and they go, we've installed it and I go. Well, that's not what I asked.

Mark Smith: 11:01
So the challenge is obviously a global challenge, right? Because I'm coming across that all the time. Oh yeah, we put it in last year, so we have a COE. No, you don't. Have you done anything on it since? No, Ah, so, and I think it's created a lot of confusion as concept of COE and what I am finding. You have to take a step back the minute you're wanting to touch stuff in an organization that the big folks play in, and I'm talking about systems of record type systems that have been in for years SAP, for example. When they look at making an ecosystem work, they take it from a DevSecOps perspective, right, and I find if you do not have that discussion upfront, if you're really going to scale in an organization, you have to get that story right and you have to get sign off. From a DevSecOps perspective, you have to get buy-in of the security implications of connected systems and honoring of people's privilege based on their security profiles across those systems. So I'm not even taking it from the perspective of exposing data outside of an organization. I'm talking about exposing data to people inside an organization that is confidential. Hey, role's a classic example, right, and so people are fearful because they have had history in these larger organizations where people have exposed dumb things right, and people have gone oh, what's the CEO making? Hey, what's going on here? And so this has happened in the past. I've got customers where they are absolutely fearful of giving access to SAP data because they are worried or connecting or making a connector to these things, because they are worried about honoring of governance across ecosystems inside their organization. So I'm finding the issue is not technically, can we do it? The issue is what's the security implication of doing it? Until you've had that conversation and put it to sleep, you're going to have barriers, because I'm seeing it even in the posts I've been doing a lot lately and LinkedIn around SAP and the Power Platform story together. The resistance organizations have and it was interesting somebody from Slumberj jumped on my thread a couple of weeks ago who said, mate, our org is like no, like our SAP folks are saying no, we don't want you to integrate at that level. We don't, even though they're a massive user of the Power Platform. There's this resistance because it's fair, of the unknown and also the security integration component or the security profile of the organization hasn't been unpacked and agreed on properly rather than just shutting the doors and just saying no, there hasn't been that education and learnings.

Ana Demeny: 13:55
Just wanted to give an example as well, because I had the exact same example. Organization doesn't want to integrate SAP with dynamics at the time because of security implications and all of the things that they didn't trust. But the systems had to communicate because you've got the same data, folks Like you're working in the same firm you need to use the same components, right? So analysts and I don't know important people once, right, they would copy lines of code and JSON and paste it in the World Wide Web to pre-defy, to be, able to exactly like I had.

William Dorrington: 14:48
Is that Tim Berners Lee on the line all of a sudden?

Ana Demeny: 14:52
No, that wasn't that crazy. So because the organization did not trust the security and governance component of the Power Platform and Dynamics, people had to jump through hopes to actually do their job. So they would paste super important information into random software and websites on the internet so that they could do API calls and things like that.

William Dorrington: 15:32
But that's what they do with GPT now anyway, so so.

Andrew Welch: 15:36
That's just described the entire era of AI technology, and I'm happy that you took us in that direction, right, because I think that it's important to call out here that within the Microsoft community, right, there's some strange subcultures at work, right, and everyone sort of knows. All you have to do is go to, you know, go to a Microsoft conference and see that the same crowd of people is running over to the data platform sessions and there's a different crowd of people that is running over to the power platform sessions, and never the two shall meet. But you know, there is a very unique business applications, power platforms subculture that has emerged around this topic in the Microsoft space, right? So this podcast just now fell into the trap of it. We started talking about creating the conditions for success and immediately we jumped to talking about how people talk about oh, I've deployed the COE, or I've installed the COE which, by the way, surefire way to get me to not take you seriously as a technology practitioner is to use phrases like I installed the COE, like you say that we're done.

William Dorrington: 17:02
And that's it. That's my absolute bug bear. That frustrates me so much. But it also shows client maturity, which is you know, when you ask at the beginning, you know where they are on their journey. You go right at the beginning. Fantastic, we've got so much to talk about. Have a coffee sit down, yeah.

Andrew Welch: 17:20
It's sort of like a drinking game. Can you get someone to talk about installing the COE? We don't even need to have an assessment or a workshop. After that, we know where you are, we know what you've done.

William Dorrington: 17:31
It's gonna be a fun couple of years, yeah.

Andrew Welch: 17:33
I do think, though, that it's important to say that, even there, we're just talking about a technology that is specific to the power platform realm, and I think that the reason that you jump there, that one jumps there, is because there is this frankly, it's peculiar this subculture around governance and creating the conditions for success when it comes to power platform, but there's so much else out there across the Microsoft cloud, right? So, you know, when we're talking about ALM, for example, we're not just talking about and I said this earlier we're not just talking about deploying apps. We're talking about, sometimes, deploying infrastructure, or sometimes we're talking about deploying data platform components. When we talk about platform management, which is where the COE starter kit lives, we also should be in a true ecosystem setting. We also should be talking about Azure Monitor. We should be talking about app insights. We should be talking about a whole range of technologies, and I think that if people take nothing else away from this conversation today, it's that the extent of creating the conditions for success does not end at your particular chosen area of the technology, and that's really important.

William Dorrington: 18:59
And I think actually it's not, and we say everything's tying back to the past podcast, which I love. You know it's that continuation. But it's not just about the tech as well. It's about all the boards, all the governance you put around it within the people, within the process, and we can't remove that either. So the governance boards, the security boards that Mark highlighted there, which, unless you go in and piece a client and say we can control this, we have processes, we'll take it through TDA, business design authorities, et cetera, that also comes part of setting that enablement layer of excellence to ensure everything else can then be built on. So it's not just about the tooling.

Andrew Welch: 20:25
So I've been helping some of the CIOs that I work with set up what we've called their ecosystem design authority, and you know basically what we're doing there is we're taking a pretty classic approach in the design authority and we're applying it to the work of growing and maturing and building your cloud ecosystem. And people are so used to thinking in terms of their own technology that I see people walking into these ecosystem design authority discussions and it's like all they wanna talk about is, oh, what I'm doing in this little particular area with this little particular project, and I'm having to explain again and again. No, you're on this call or you're sitting in this room because you are representing an entire domain within the cloud right. You are representing the integration domain, or you are representing the core business systems neighborhood, or you are representing all of the dynamics apps deployed here, or all of the Azure infrastructure deployed here, and your job as part of an ecosystem design authority is to work with your colleagues who represent the cloud solution architects, who represent other technology areas or domains, and piece all of this together. And that is a wild concept to almost everybody, because people are still very, very used to working within their little workload box, and it's really been eye-opening for me.

William Dorrington: 22:00
We covered that on the last podcast which is, people will always stick to their lens of you which we can't blame them for, because you know what you know and you've seen what you've seen. So you'll always relate it back to the knowledge you have rather than and I have the same situation when we talk about ecosystem enablement, we go straight to Microsoft, you go all about AWS. What about Google Cloud? What about all the other things out there outside our sphere of knowledge? So I absolutely agree. I don't know, anna's from some of the articles, except you pushed out that that's a lot more your world of thought, isn't it?

Ana Demeny: 22:32
It is, it is 100%, and I think what's happening as well is that sometimes executives do not see this gap very clearly Because they believe that if they have a very good team and leadership for an area and then they have really good teams and leadership for other areas let's just say, you know business applications and then Azure then that's enough. You talk to them and they're like no, we do it all, we have everything, we go in and we do everything, when, in point of fact, they do not, because they either sell one or they sell the other, and they don't even think about AWS or Google Cloud and the only place where you are actually creating conditions for success for anyone who's using any other technology, that then Microsoft is because they came to you, it's because they were like oh, we're doing ecosystem architecture and we'd like to tap into business applications, dynamics, azure, whatever it is. You know that that's the only scenario. When you see anything like that.

Andrew Welch: 24:03
So, guys, how do we recast creating the conditions for success in an ecosystem world? I think that lots of folks have this down when they're just working in terms of, say, data platform or Azure infrastructure or power platform or, you know, google or AWS technology. How do we recast this? What does creating the conditions for success look like in an ecosystem-driven world, rather than a slice of the technology world?

Mark Smith: 24:36
So just riffing off the back of that and really extending your question because I'm not going to answer it, because I'm interested in the answer, as in, I don't have the answer, so that's why I'm not answering it. How do you get people that are deeply expertise in a stack, an ecosystem let's take PEGA, let's take Oracle, let's take SAP, let's take Blue Prism, you name it, uipath, et cetera, servicenow how do you take people that are this is their career, this is their focus area, they are embedded into the organization and they generally will have a bunch of people that report up to them. Right, I'm talking enterprise? Right, and you've got power platformers you'll have somebody in that space dynamics, you know bzaps M through 6.5, et cetera. How do you bring those parties together around a common core and vision? That is not all about them defending their territory or defending that, why theirs is the best way to do it. You know, I've come up recently very strongly in the whole PEGA area. We've got 300 PEGA developers. So we should be doing it with PEGA. But what's it costing you like for doing some of these things and what's your backlog like and things like that? And it's kind of like there's kind of this resistance to a multi-ecosystem play. They're like this is our system, we'll defend it. We won't look at the other part. How do you bring people together? Because this is not a technology discussion really, it's a people discussion.

William Dorrington: 26:05
It's a behavioral one here.

Ana Demeny: 26:06
And I think that there is a reason why we even have that. Even in this day and age, you really really value deep expertise. So a PEGA developer they're going to be like. No, I'm not going to waste my time doing some of this project, you know, developing some of this project in PEGA and then learning how to integrate it with something else and trying to make data flow into something else, and so on and so forth, because that's time wasted for me. I can get such a high salary, you know, with just my area, or if I'm security and compliance, if I'm infrastructure, if I'm I don't know open AI. I don't want to waste my time like that. My way is the best way. Thank you, it's just the way it is.

William Dorrington: 27:04
I'm just going to do what I always do, which I say I do a load of rambling, and then Andrew sort of somehow sort of he's my own personal chat GPT, and he just summarizes what I actually meant. It's a lovely relationship we have.

Andrew Welch: 27:16
So you're outsourcing just like Mark does.

William Dorrington: 27:20
Yeah, that's how it works.

Ana Demeny: 27:22
His $5 jobs go to the web. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

William Dorrington: 27:27
You are my fivercom, Andrew.

Ana Demeny: 27:29
That's what that is.

William Dorrington: 27:32
So I absolutely agree with what you're saying there and I think there is there is a lot of protectionism around the knowledge you have, because that's people feel from the old IT back in the day your knowledge was your worth and you kept it to yourself. I like to think that actually the platform world has changed because there's so much knowledge that one cannot attain it as fast and hold it as quick as you could back in the day. But it comes through a behavioral issue and actually we saw this a lot. If we ignore every other piece of technology which a lot of people are so great at doing and actually just focus on Microsoft for a second. We saw this a lot between communities back in the day, between CRM and F&O, where F&O was always the answer for everything, as CRM was, and it was only when they started we started getting more sales coming through around. Actually, you know, you can stitch the two together. You can make your sales, you can get a lead, convert to an opportunity, price it out, win it. Push the project, do some soft allocation, push the project over to F&O. Do your project management accounting, push back what's going on. It's only when that started to happen the architects and the consultants were going well, how do you do that over there? What is the functionality? I would like to know the high level aspects of it. And it was suddenly an incentive. And actually, if you also look at the way Microsoft structured sales, you know which they change every year, which is just lovely, and it went from actually, we're not going to incentivize you on Power Platform, we're only incentivize you on Dynamics. So you start getting loads of people pushing Dynamics when they should have pushed Power Platform and vice versa. And I think, when it comes to behavior, that incentive, that incentive approach, as well as the environment you create, are two really important aspects. So I think what Sachin Adele has done with the and we mentioned this last time the hit refresh, putting people together, making the platforms more open, so you kind of have to learn SAP and other items you want to still make yourself valuable is the way to go, but I think that's still going to take quite a few years to get to that point. I don't think I've really answered the question there, but I've given my view on some of the issues that I feel exist and some of the motivations that I think we need to start pushing towards, which is opening up the gates a bit more and making sure we're going after more clients with multi-cloud and recommending more multi-cloud approaches.

Mark Smith: 29:41
I don't know. We're getting to an answer, and that's okay. I feel is that because there'll be folks listening to this that may be able to contribute. Right, they might be able to go. You know what. This is how you do it, this is how you know, this is what I've seen work, so they just might have some insight that they can share with us. So if you're listening and you do have insights around this where we're obviously not really drilling to it, how do you bring these folks together? I think that this, the whole reason we're doing this show, is around collaboration. It's not just us being experts by any stretch. It's about engaging with you, and if you've got insights that you can bring you know to this conversation, we're keen to have it. Andrew.

Andrew Welch: 30:23
Well, look so. So I'm happy that Will mentioned incentives, right? So because I think that that incentives thank you Will, incentives are such an important part of this. So let me try out a few ideas on you guys. One is that, from a financial perspective, whether it's a budgeting perspective and I'm thinking from a budgeting perspective that's mostly happening inside of the end customer organization, right? So the bank or the manufacturing firm or the law firm or the retail organization, whatever it might be that's using the technology, or inside of the partner, inside of the consultancy, where you know I think we're probably talking less about budgeting than we were talking about P&L, profit and loss, how you know how is the business doing serving its customers, but incentives are hugely important here. So, one, inside of the end customer stop tying budgets to baskets of requirements that you then turn around and give to a technology focused team. Don't give budget and basket of requirements to your RPA team, because they're going to produce the thing out of RPA. In the case of partners, where I actually see a lot of this problem existing and I think it's driven in the partner organization, I'm increasingly convinced that you should not structure P&Ls, you should not structure profit and loss, profit and loss around technology areas. Do not create a power platform team or an Azure infrastructure team or a security team and then tell them we're going to measure you based on success of your P&L. If you have to break your business into P&Ls which is a perfectly reasonable sort of reality of business do that around industry right. Say, listen, we're in the financial services space or we're in the public sector space. You're going to have a P&L. Go use whatever technology is the most appropriate technology. Otherwise, you're creating incentives and this is in the partner space. You are creating incentives for your own people to fight with one another right In order to pad their bottom line, often at the expense of the customer that you are serving. So I just think, in order to really create the conditions for success in an ecosystem world, you have to stop paying people to maximize the use of their own tech, regardless of whether it is technically or business appropriate. Until you fix that, you're not going to be able to do this. You're not going to be able to do ecosystems particularly well.

William Dorrington: 33:13
Then the high-flying partners, the ones that we all know and love, and we can name some of the likes of Hitachi, etc. They are industry aligned and they do focus on that. That's what allows them to do so well and move so fast, without getting these random pockets of isolated myopia which we see in other places. I 100% agree with you there. I think we have seen an evolution of industry-led P&L as we've moved forward. I think back in the day it was slightly different because the technology was different at that point in time.

Ana Demeny: 33:41
I think that another thing that organizations could do is to stop adding functionality into buckets altogether, because that brings them back into the unimplementing workloads. Idea and reality A lot of the conditions for success are not something that you can quantify right away. You don't see it. So it's really difficult once you've promised a number of functionality and features, without taking into account the fact that you're going to have a solid platform overall and you're going to have to draw a proper architecture diagram for your project and you're going to have to set specific security roles, and then all of this has to be compliant and everything needs to map together and follow the same CI CD pipelines, for example. Instead, you're just promising a button or process or any sort of sparkles instead. Then you're going to get into trouble with that P&L because you're not going to be able to deliver on the conditions for success and therefore evolve and therefore create that incentive for your teams to work together. A lot of that is assumed. Andrew's reading this book and he's really into his book right now.

Andrew Welch: 35:36
He was telling me about it's because I only read one book a year. Yes, right, that's the best of the issue is.

Ana Demeny: 35:43
He was telling me that we come from different context cultures. I think that's valid in software as well. Andrew can explain this better, but just to tell you, what my understanding was is the fact that for me, for example, the moment we talk about something, the moment we talk about creating a project, I am immediately thinking, okay, so I'm going to need like three or four environments. This is going to be like my pipeline and I'm going to have to get sign off from that compliance person and this compliance person.

William Dorrington: 36:28
Your Sprint Zero stuff.

Ana Demeny: 36:31
Exactly. There's going to be like a website and I'm going to have to talk to that team and this team and I'm going to have to ask the Infra guy and so on and so forth. So the moment we're talking about a project, I am already thinking about all of this. So before you even get a feature, I want to do all of these other things. But that's just my context. For me that's just common sense, whereas Andrew is going to go there because he comes from a different culture, where Americans tend to explain everything and enumerate everything. There's a constant running commentary about everything. He's going to start writing it down and I'm like what do you mean? That's just common sense and in my opinion, that's one of the reasons why organizations don't create conditions for success, because sometimes the customer assumes those things will exist and they don't even write them down. They never ask for them and the partner takes it literally. They're like okay, we're just going to create a bunch of camera saps. Please, where's my I don't know 50 grand or whatever. That's why I believe this is one of the reasons why organizations started being so focused on workloads still, instead of going a bit deeper.

Andrew Welch: 38:13
I love what you've just said for a couple reasons. One, because I am, it is true, super into this book, and I should say that Anna is correct. According to this book, it's the culture map by Aaron Meyer. I cannot everyone on this podcast should read it, since we do have this podcast five people from five different countries. In any case, yeah, the Americans are notoriously the most the biggest explainers on earth. We're very used to having to explain ourselves and to be quite literal about everything, but nonetheless, anna, what I love about what you just said is that there's all these things that I think you sort of take for granted, that are implicit we're going to go build this app or we're going to go implement this workload, and there's all these things that need to happen in order to make that successful. So let me pull us back to what really creating the conditions for success are. Right, Creating the conditions for success is all about putting in place those things, and you talked about some of them environments, alm. See, now I'm explaining what Anna just said. Right, I am a low context communicator, being American and such, but creating the conditions for success is about building those things such that they are reusable and that they are available and then doing it at scale so that, rather than saying we're going to leave every app that is built or every workload that is implemented to go deal with its own ALM, to go deal with its own environment strategy, to go deal with its own security model, to do its own monitoring, etc. Etc. We're going to build them all and we're going to nurture and mature those capabilities from a central place so that they are available across the ecosystem, so that apps can be built and things can be automated and workloads can be implemented faster without the redundancy of having to do this again and again and again and again each time. And to connect this back to what Will said earlier, that really is what a COE is. That's what a cloud COE is. It's not about oh, did you deploy the monitoring tool? It is. Did you build the components that people can use again and again and again so that they will be more successful?

William Dorrington: 40:38
And why wouldn't you want to do that as a business? It's a lot cheaper.

Andrew Welch: 40:43
Oh, by the way.

William Dorrington: 40:46
Don't rebuild, reuse, you already wasted the effort. So yeah, no, it was a beautiful summary. I'll give you that five or later then, Andrew.

Andrew Welch: 40:54
Are you? Do you prefer Monzo or Revolute? I'll just send you a bill. I'll send you a bill now.

Mark Smith: 41:00
One thing that your concept has raised, andrew, around moving away from technology-led practices to industry-led practices is something that some years ago, I remember sitting in a meeting with one of the largest insurance companies in the world and I was sitting in the room with them with the context being. The context being it was in Australia, but the CTO was Australian for the global org right, so he was making a name for himself as part of that and he came to Microsoft and I was in the room as a Microsoft guest for the conversation and it was around Microsoft. We want you in the room. We want to understand what you have seen in other industries that you can bring to the table. We don't just want to buy your software off you, but we believe that you're operating in all these unrelated industry areas and there's probably insights that you've learned that you could apply to our business. That wouldn't be a conflict or anything like that. But this is totally unrelated because we're so head down in our industry vertical that we don't see what we can't see. So how do you tackle that in that industry conversation? And then the other thing is I work for a small company that is very technology-paractist-centric and those practices have their P&Ls and they even compete with the same customer with their technology stack. And I thought it was brilliant idea of focusing around industry. How do you then address the community of people that have chosen a skilled area that they're in but now it's like they're not getting that exposure to cross industries? Because let's take three industries, let's take mining and gas, let's take banking or financial services and let's take government. Does that mean inside my organization, because I specialize in a particular subset of Microsoft, being business applications. Does that mean I now, as a leader in that space, need to create one team of people for each of those industries and play those teams in? And how do you? It starts to get complex, right. So what are your thoughts on how you keep that simple, that you still allow people to share that tacit knowledge that they learn off each other from being in the same space, that when they look at the leaders in the industry space they can see somebody they're modeling towards. My concern would be do you create that team becomes very disparate, and already we're in a very disparate world since COVID, where most of my staff do not see each other face to face not every couple of months, right, they are out on customer projects. They are remote, they're working from home. How do you create that? Back to culture, and I know you talked about the culture map and I quickly looked to see if I'd read it, but it's the culture code that I've read, which, by the way, is an amazing, amazing book which is around setting culture in your teams.

Andrew Welch: 44:21
Well, and on the next episode of Ecosystems, we're just going to have a book club. We're just going to talk about you know. But it'll be amazing.

Ana Demeny: 44:30
I actually read the culture code as well, but all of the hints are in person, right? All of the all of this, most of the strategies, all of the recipes for success, you know, revolve about around people being in the same room, restaurant, war zone, et cetera.

Mark Smith: 44:57
But we have to change it right. Our world has changed so much, and so I'm always resistant when people go. That's why we need to be back in the office, and I know we're slightly pivoting here, but no, we've got to go. Hey, this is a new world of work. How do we still create culture without going? Oh, it only works under one dimension, which is, you know, you're in the same bar together.

Andrew Welch: 45:22
I think we should actually come back to this is a good topic maybe to the end of the discussion, because we need to talk about remote work on the ecosystems we need to tackle that.

William Dorrington: 45:36
But, mark, you asked a lot of questions there, but your first one I think it's a really interesting one, which was more around creating the conditions for success, but in this case we're talking about resource operational models. So you're, you know, you stated saying that in a world where we're saying we should get more focus and we definitely should on industry-led approaches, so not technology-led but industry-led, and, let's face it, actually let's bring some more color back into this. So we know that Salesforce, you know, to Microsoft, have always been an absolute bloody nightmare to them. But one thing we can always say about Salesforce, whether you like their tech or not, you know which are not entirely against it, although I'll probably get Sachin Adela come knock on the door in a minute and beat me up. He seems like a nice guy. Actually I could take it.

Andrew Welch: 46:24
For those of you who don't know, Will is a very tall man, right, so so?

Mark Smith: 46:32
A very tall ex yeah.

Andrew Welch: 46:35
He could definitely take Mark, sorry bro.

Ana Demeny: 46:37
Yeah, we all seem the same, the same height, but we are not.

William Dorrington: 46:43
We're post a picture at the next reunion. But what's going on is we all know that Salesforce are phenomenal sellers actually, and they were really good at understanding you needed to be industry aligned before Microsoft started with their Cloud 4 approach. And what I'm trying to say there is actually, if we go then back to Mark's question, which is that operational model, it comes down to a resourcing part. Right, and I'm just going to sort of speak and not really answer and leave it and get opinions, but it's something partners have discussed for a long time, which is right. If we are industry aligned, do we do that by pods? Do we have like a mini board where we'll have a commercial lead, a technology lead, we'll have a client services lead and they work together and then you actually have maybe pre-sales underneath them, or is pre-sales centralized elsewhere? And then you know, in Central Gulf, for example, in the UK, you have GDS knowledge, cddo knowledge that is very specialist. How deep do we take that? Do we leave that with the architects, make sure they're aligned, or do we allow the architects to be part of a central resourcing model that allows them to float between the various industries? And the problem is if you leave an architect or a lead consultant too long in one industry, you get that message going. Well, I've been on the project for a year and I'm a bit bored and I've seen what they're doing over in commercial and it sounded really exciting. So it's a really tough question to ask, because you have the logic behind best practice and industry best practice, but then you have the human factor of we actually get bored quite quick if we stay in one area.

Andrew Welch: 48:10
So I think that I mean, let's be clear, We've now moved on from a technology discussion, as this group tends to do, but we're going to boomerang right back around to become very technology focused, I'm sure. But let's talk about the people side of this, and I think that there's a number of techniques that an organization can sort of blend together. You don't need to do all these things, but here's some ideas. First of all, technology-centric practices, I think actually can be. They're very useful, right. They create opportunities for people to learn from one another and whatever kind of goes into that from a leadership perspective, and what does the practice offer in terms of learning and development and you know, et cetera, et cetera. I think that that's a pretty open question, and different organizations are going to do different things, but the technology-centric practice should not have the financial incentives or should not have P&L attached to it. There are other ways, I think, to measure the success of that technology. I also think that allowing your people to affiliate with different, with multiple practices is really useful, right. So allow someone to be a part of your digital and app innovation practice and your data platform practice, for example. Encourage that. Those are great opportunities for people. I think that rotation is also useful. So I grew up in the US Coast Guard, I've spent a lot of time around military organizations and this is something actually that I think that at least Western militaries do quite well. Right, Say, listen, you're going to spend a length of time in this job and then we're going to move you. You're going to get moved on to something else and you're going to learn something else and you're going to get exposed to something else. So within a IT organization or within a technology partner, say, we're going to put you in this role for a period of time and you're going to focus on this technology, and then we're going to move you to this technology. And you do that with people earlier on in their career before they start to specialize and repeat the trick across industries, so that then people are going into that insurance firm and they're saying, yeah, this is what you're doing and you know your industry very well. But let me tell you what I was doing last year when I was over in public sector or when I was over in manufacturing.

William Dorrington: 50:47
But, Andrew, that goes back to the thing that we're saying about why Sachin Adele has done so well with Microsoft. So I'm going back and wanting to fight him. Now I'm praising him again, which is putting different teams with each other, and actually relates back to, you know, although you didn't say this explicitly, but when you was talking about the culture map and the fact that we all have different views, different perspectives and we all have different experiences. Like you know, you just spoke about your more military upbringing, and that's completely different to other people in America who wouldn't have had that, so they would have had a different slice altogether. And that's why it's so important that we have diverse teams as well. So not just diverse technology, but diverse teams from people from all different places, that melting pot of both talent, views and technologies, and then that's a true ecosystem enabler.

Andrew Welch: 51:29
But you can't do that if you're your personnel organization right. You can't do that if your talent and your HR organization is just treating this as business as usual. I'm going to recruit people, I'm going to put them in a role and I'm going to, you know, deal with their role and their benefits and everything. So you have to be a really kind of activist HR team in order to prioritize that kind of rotation, prioritize that opportunity creation.

William Dorrington: 51:59
HR, resourcing and hire.

Andrew Welch: 52:02
Exactly, exactly.

William Dorrington: 52:04
And that gives a great culture and there the companies that thrive.

Ana Demeny: 52:06
Yeah, I think that is a wonderful thing to do and I do believe organizations should have that flexibility and that enablement throughout, yeah, so that people can actually do that. But then it doesn't always work for everyone, because humans are messy and humans are complicated. So you may have person X, who's a big board of their industry and they'd like to do a little bit of commercial, but they hate the boss at commercial. Or they don't hate the boss at commercial they actually quite like them but they have deep loyalty for their present leader, so they feel bad to sort of switch things around. Yeah.

William Dorrington: 53:03
It's a motive, yeah no-transcript.

Ana Demeny: 53:08
People are bored of what they're doing, but they love the feeling of knowing what they're doing. In Microsoft, we always have this prepare to leave with constant ambiguity thing and it doesn't really work for everyone. Also, people need to have a very high level of agency, whereas that works with very junior personnel, in my opinion, because you will move them from one area or one industry to another industry and they will be open to learning and this is their job in the end to learn more and eventually to produce results for their company. I think it's gonna be increasingly harder for people who are more senior and who by then they have families, they have messy lives. They really don't feel like going and exploring and knowing your friends. Do you know the song, know New Friends? That sort of thing.

William Dorrington: 54:12
Could you sing it to us?

Ana Demeny: 54:15
No. But, I'll teach Andrew, but I'll teach Andrew the song and then he'll sing it to you because he has a beautiful, gorgeous voice. But I mean what I'm saying, including in my team at Microsoft, because in my team at Microsoft, people were and are allowed to choose their technology every year, and you will be surprised that they choose the same thing over and over and over again. And whoever doesn't choose the same thing over and over and over again tends to be more successful, exactly like you're saying, and tends to have a broader view, but also a more difficult life. So my question here would be who are we talking to right now and through this podcast? Who are we addressing? Are we addressing people who are ready to go above and beyond, or are we addressing, or is that enough for our organizations to succeed? Are there enough people who are willing to do that?

William Dorrington: 55:26
So, to answer your immediate question, it's only my mom that I know that listens to this podcast to support us.

Andrew Welch: 55:31
My dad has gotten super into this, actually, yeah.

William Dorrington: 55:34
There are only listeners, quite frankly, but I would say the answer to your question is yes, anna, which is no matter how old we get, it's still our parents listening to this. Yes, I think the answer is complex. I mean, what Andrew and I was I think the point was coming from is more of a utopic situation of trying the best to enable people, but of course, as anyone that's been in a senior position, an executive position, it's more complex than that and actually most of your time is dealing with HR issues. So, yeah, it is tough. I think that's a whole podcast episode on itself Utopic what the heck is that? Well, I guess, utopia?

Andrew Welch: 56:11
Oh nice, you know. I sorry rednecks like me, just you know.

Mark Smith: 56:15
Gotcha, gotcha.

Andrew Welch: 56:17
Anna, this is a great point, and I think that we, you know, we need to be careful to not just fashion a world. That is what we are into and this is something that Anna and I have talked a lot about, because, yes, this is what we talk about when we have dinner together, and that's that the there's a need for specialists. There is a need for people who are really focused in one area of the technology Like I can make cloud security work to a really deep level. I can make the data platform work to a really deep level. And then there is where I think that there's a lot of growth potential are for the people who know enough about a lot of things to piece them together, right, and to create that vision and to create that ecosystem architecture and then involve and empower and pass this stuff to the really really deep experts in a particular technology. And there's a symbiotic relationship between those people right, in that it is the experts in the particular technology that are gonna make the thing work, but it is the I'm gonna use the phrase cloud strategist again, which I was talking to someone recently about. It's the cloud strategist that has to continually bring those experts to the table together and say, hey, you know, this is what we need to do in order to achieve the best interests of the whole, and it's a real give and take. There's no specific recipe here. There's no way for us to divine every scenario, but I think that that's really important and it's necessary because the technology is moving too quickly at this point for the people who know one area deeply to know enough about everything that's happening, and it's moving too quickly for the people who know how to piece everything together to really, I think, get intimate with a particular you know, to go build out a particular workload or to architect something really specific. We have to do this.

Mark Smith: 58:26
First up. We're gonna go around the room with a few questions, Just so Andrew knows where his question's gonna appear. It's going to be first.

Andrew Welch: 58:40
I'm not gonna live this down.

Mark Smith: 58:42
It's gonna be first. It's gonna be first. Okay, so Will Anna, you've got time to think about this. When you think of going overseas on a flight to a conference, a big conference, where you know you're gonna be three days walking the massive metropolis of a conference center, the scale like they have in Vegas, what are the kind of key things that you wanna make sure you're carrying on your person? You don't wanna like a laptop around, right, you don't wanna as an, but what are kind of the key things that you know through to get you through the day so you don't have to go back to your hotel room? That type of thing. What's for one of a better term, american term? What's in your fanny pack? Oh, so so I, you really want a fanny pack, by the way. No, don't don't we all? No, no, no, we all, no, we all.

Ana Demeny: 59:48
I mean, it's the same thing. He wants to carry it like this, but it's honestly, it's the same thing.

Andrew Welch: 59:53
Can I just point out that this is the second episode in a row in which my obsession with man bags has come up. I mean, it's just.

Mark Smith: 1:00:00
I just bought one yesterday.

Andrew Welch: 1:00:04
Nice. Can you model it for us?

Mark Smith: 1:00:06
Oh no, no, it's, it's an. I purchased it yesterday. That means it's gotta come across the world. It's a Bell Roy. Is yours a Bell Roy? Yeah, of course.

William Dorrington: 1:00:15
No, shall we leave, shall we leave.

Andrew Welch: 1:00:20
I have a Bell Roy inside of my Bell Roy. It's a great, great stuff.

Mark Smith: 1:00:25
Bell Roy's are amazing, yeah, so so question up, you're first Andrew. What's your kind of must have?

Andrew Welch: 1:00:33
I have. I have an iPad mini and I love the thing. I used to have one of the largest iPads you could have and I finally decided. You know, I have this giant iPad which I really only have for like 5% of my use cases, so I downsized, but I love that. That iPad mini is fantastic.

Mark Smith: 1:00:55
Do they still have the iPad mini? Can you still buy it? I thought they discontinued it.

Andrew Welch: 1:01:00
They know it's beautiful. Okay, and in theory, Anna and I also use it when we, when we fly, because the baby the baby sleeps soundly and we're able to watch a show, but except for debate. Does that happen, Anna?

Ana Demeny: 1:01:20
that's not a really. Thing.

Andrew Welch: 1:01:21
Yeah, right, right.

Ana Demeny: 1:01:23
No, but that was the plan. Okay, so you have an iPad mini. What else, Andrew, in your fanny pack?

Andrew Welch: 1:01:30
What else?

Mark Smith: 1:01:31
What else do you always want? To make sure what's on your checklist.

Andrew Welch: 1:01:35
A flask.

Mark Smith: 1:01:36
Nice Yep Water.

Andrew Welch: 1:01:37
Okay, hydration, yeah, no, you're actually meaning a flask, no Well, so I also have this. I also have this water bottle here that I don't even know if this works, but they did a great job selling it to me. It is the Lark water bottle where you. It uses UV light to sterilize the water, so I don't know if anything's really happening, but I'm good about it.

William Dorrington: 1:02:06
Are we doing product placement on this? Yeah, I reckon I'm good.

Mark Smith: 1:02:10
Anyone who thinks it's sponsored or something my gosh, my gosh, last one, last one.

Andrew Welch: 1:02:15
When I go to a conference, what's the number one thing that I like to have with me? It's Anna.

Mark Smith: 1:02:20
It's true, aww, that's so sweet, that's so sweet. It's evening time, where you are right.

Andrew Welch: 1:02:26
Oh yes, but she's in. She's in Romania and I'm in London right now.

Mark Smith: 1:02:30
Anna, what's on your list of things that you want to pack for your future?

Ana Demeny: 1:02:35
You're prepared like a good Girl Scout. No, I think no product placement here. I actually bring, I actually bring a bunch of stuff. I bring my phone, a portable battery, headphones or like my AirPods. There you go. Product placement. There you go. I always bring a lipstick. I bring the odorant.

Mark Smith: 1:03:09
Yes, yes, will does as well. Is that because you also need to Andrew? Yes, yes.

Ana Demeny: 1:03:15
So lipstick, the odorant, which is very important to me water bottle as well.

Mark Smith: 1:03:22
Yeah.

Ana Demeny: 1:03:23
Yeah, I think that's about it. Once upon a time, I used to bring shoes as well, because I was wearing impossible heels. Yes, but now I'm old so I just wear flats.

William Dorrington: 1:03:35
Yeah, me too.

Ana Demeny: 1:03:36
So I don't. I'm not exactly not wearing shoes anymore, in my bag, that's it?

Andrew Welch: 1:03:41
Speaking of water bottles, why don't you tell everyone what you did to pour chippy here?

Ana Demeny: 1:03:47
It was all out of good intentions and he was not. Well, I threw it across the ferry. It was not in on purpose. I'm sorry, chippy.

Andrew Welch: 1:03:59
It's true, yeah.

Mark Smith: 1:04:02
Will. What are your must-have foods?

William Dorrington: 1:04:03
I love these little insights we get into Andrew and Andrew's relationship, exactly, exactly. The fact that they've named it chippy. Anyway, so obviously thank you for letting me go almost last year, mark, because I got to have a little bit more thinking, which I wish I do need. So water is a must for me. You can tell I've drunk all of this since being on this podcast, so I consume a lot. Another one for me is a Belvita, because I end up, I walk so much and I can't help it. I like taking a little snack and I sometimes just if we end up going out to a pub or something, I'll sneak it out there and just have a lovely little snack when I'm hungry. Possible battery, because a big thing for me is actually I find conferences quite overwhelming. Although I appear really extrovert, which I am, I still need a lot of recharge in time on my own so I can just plug in Netflix, watch a podcast. Then the last two one is a notepad, because I'm very hyperactive and I forget actually what I've compensations I've had, although I've really enjoyed them. And I want to remember the last one, which is I hope you all do this because it's a phenomenal trick we go to these events. We then move on with Mark or Andrew and Anna. We go to the pub. It's suddenly 2am, you go back to your hotel and you go. Which room number am I? Yeah, so you take a picture of your room number, and that's it. That's what I take with me, and I'm good to go then I was just going to say that.

Andrew Welch: 1:05:20
The number one thing because there's a lot of commonality here, but the number one thing that I don't see enough people doing when they go to these conferences. It's not about what you bring or what you carry, it's about the thought you put in. Before you go. I always like to say, listen, I'm going to go to this conference, these are the things that I want to learn and these are the conversations that I want to have. So it's put a little thought into things you want to learn and also things that you want to achieve or ideas that you want to tee up. That level of preparation before a conference I think is really useful and not enough people are doing it.

Mark Smith: 1:05:57
So to do that, I agree, I agree and I'll put up on screen the reason I asked. I found out this week that my executive layer want me in Vegas. This will be the first big trip that I have done since leaving the UK.

Ana Demeny: 1:06:14
Oh wow, that's really amazing.

Mark Smith: 1:06:17
And of course, I'm going back to going shit. I'm a very checklist type person and I'm like I used to always have these sleeping pills that you can only buy in America that are just epic for planes. I can get on and listen before takeoff. As a rule on any flight before takeoff I can train myself to go to sleep, but if I really want to stay in that deep sleep for a long time, I pop a couple of these little blue pills and they are just amazing to keep me sound asleep. I knew you guys were going to go down.

William Dorrington: 1:06:55
I mean, I was like quiet the flight. It really does. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew Welch: 1:06:59
But on a plane, mark come on, what, what, yeah exactly.

Mark Smith: 1:07:05
The Mile High Club was invented for a reason. A couple other things I just want to bring up here. Oh, I'll come back to that one On our first podcast. Nathan Ross made this comment here and I said we would discuss it on an ex podcast, but he actually asked it the day that we had recorded our previous podcast. So it's Chris Huntingford's post, as you can see. So he's actually made the show, even though he's not made the show, and you can see here that this chat was great to watch. Specifically, he's saying to me off previously advocated where we should specialize due to the growing size and complexity of BizApp stacked from Microsoft. So we'd love to hear more about how, as BizApp professionals, should be prepared to position ourselves for tomorrow. Great episode, thanks. Okay. So thanks, nathan, great to have your engagement. And I said listen, we will. I think under these replies I said, hey, we'll bring up in these comments in the next episode. So if you're commenting, by the way, and we think it's great, we'll bring it onto the show. But I suppose I'll give my opinion. You guys can give yours. What he's referring to in the 19 day mentoring challenge that I did, you know, I started in the UK and I ran it for five years. I would say that BizApp's had grown so large that when I started, by Korea and I started in MSCRM back in 2003. So 20 years ago you learned sales, marketing, customer service and then for three years you were sweet right, because the product release cycle was only once every three years, so you could easily become the guru of gurus by studying hard in the first month and then just building on that for the next three years. I was saying now we've got over 30 different applications just in the BizApp's ecosystem, then you've got the M365, then you've got OJ, then you've got AWS, google Cloud Platform, sap, all the others right. And so now we're dealing with a plethora of technologies that are demanding our time. And I used to be very big on what we'd call T consultant. Right, you need to be broad across everything, but you need to have a depth in a single area. My thoughts have evolved over time and I feel that you need to be an M consultant, which is you need to really have three key skill depth areas. Now in business, yes, you still need to be broad, but just the way the world's evolving right. One of those legs should be something AI. And where we are right. Without a doubt, you should be developing a strength in that. So I suppose my idea is I still believe that you need to have your core skill area and I suppose, andrew, throwing to you what are your thoughts around? You know, as we've talked about, are so many consultants are at that top of the pyramid. They're really cut there. Let's say they're brilliant at field service, dynamics 365, field service, and they are the go-to person for that. Do they just stay there or how do they become more relevant? And after our conversations just now, perhaps people that are deep in that won't want to actually look at a broader ecosystem landscape. But what are your thoughts to Nathan's question?

Andrew Welch: 1:10:17
So I think that in the biz apps space particularly, we could answer this question Differently for other areas of the cloud, but thinking in biz apps specifically, I think there are far too many practitioners in biz apps that don't really have a firm grasp, or even a passing grasp, of what's happening underneath of the functional layer of the application, right? So I'm not saying that you need to be able to sit down and create your own, say, data model from the ground up and build a completely custom application, right? I think that there is a very, very useful and important place for the functional knowledge that many business applications practitioners have, but I think that you need to put some energy into understanding what's happening under the covers, understanding how data is modeled, understanding how this application or this functional business area that you know really deeply, how does it integrate and plug into the rest of the ecosystem, because I just I see a lot of people who, I think, take for granted that the app is going to be there and really don't understand how it's integrating with other things or where it fits, how data flows, how data moves, how you know how at a basic level, how AI works, right, like how that data is indexed, or you know how a large language model works. So I think that the more time you can spend understanding what's under the covers of the thing that you know really well, that's only going to help you to be more rich in that thing that you have chosen, presumably because you're really passionate about it and you love it. So keep on doing that, but understand what's happening behind the curtain.

Mark Smith: 1:12:25
I like it. Okay, next one I have here. We're getting a lot of comments, more comments now on the post, and this one just came in as in, so this is.

Andrew Welch: 1:12:36
I like. Thanks, guys. Thank you, keep this coming yeah.

Mark Smith: 1:12:40
Yeah, totally. So this is our once again, our first episode, and if you go down here and if you get a chance, can you read that there. Does someone actually want to read out?

Ana Demeny: 1:12:51
In an ideal world, that one. In an ideal world, the executive board would set the overall business goals and this technology is so embedded in operations. It would be the board's collective responsibility to answer the question of what the business goal they feel technologies can have and the most significant impact on. This would pave the way for a well-guided digital transformation journey. Correct the CTO-CIO, with this top-down guidance, could focus on implementation, leveraging enterprise architecture with ensure they select the best tech to address the identified challenges.

Mark Smith: 1:13:33
So, before we go on as I'm going to let people go read it, but these are the type of I love this type of feedback on what we're doing, like people, it's nice to have. I love this. It's an excellent podcast. Yep, I love it. I love the pad on the back. That's awesome. But I love it when people are getting into the discord of the conversation, right, and they're contributing, they're adding something to it. So, hey, head on over to the show on YouTube if you want. That's the one we publish all on LinkedIn, et cetera, and jump in the comments. We really want to see that. I'm pretty sure Andrew soon is going to release a website where we're going to land all this content on, and that will be the kind of We'll fire you all that way. Guys, do you have anything else that you want to share? Or should I carry on, because I just got a couple of things that are on top of mind at the moment?

Ana Demeny: 1:14:21
I would add one thing I love the fact that the conclusion of that post and Mark didn't let me read the whole thing because I suck at reading but the conclusion of that post is that everything is about education and communication and how do we influence our boards and our C levels to see the broader picture, to make the correct assessment. And that's just wonderful. If that was the conclusion of our first episode, then it's just wonderful. I love it.

Mark Smith: 1:15:02
Yeah, really good. I also another thing Jeff Comstock just came out with a post and I found it really interesting and he says here and he's lifted an image there from Starfield which we're going to talk about in a second but they have been running co-pilots now across. Remember, co-pilot for Dynamics and Power Platform hasn't GA'd yet right, ga's next month but they've been running it across tens of thousands of call center staff in Microsoft and it's worth looking at the things like call summaries, call summary going down from to being a 10 to 15 minute process. That was a 30 to 45 minute process per person in the past. So it's well worth taking a look at this post to see if you're like it's been used in production and massive scale, eating their own dog food, as Microsoft says. But well worth it. Because I don't know about you guys, but I'm getting a lot of questions lately about where AI plays in the Power Platform. There's a lot of confusion around M365 and the licensing skew related to that and is that part of BizApps, and there's just a bit of confusion. So I seem to be doing a lot of conversations, but it's well worth Go read this. As I say Jeff Comstock, go read his post because it's exciting to see this. I've always felt that Microsoft when for years I suppose I was in London when I noticed this the most Google was always talking about their AI. They were talking about Go and how it outperformed real people and stuff, and I always liked a kind of thing from Microsoft is that they were the practical AI company. They were the usable. They were the AI company that provides tools that allow people in their day to day role to do stuff. Sure, they could have tools if they wanted that solve massive chess games or Go, but that's not usable by 99% of the rest of us that are not smart enough to play chess or Go. So I think that I love the way Microsoft bring to bear this real practicality with co-pilot. The last thing I will say is this Look at that glorious image there to add to that glorious image of Starfield and I notice a few of you looking blank. You're like what is Starfield here? Look at this. This is what I've been doing this morning, not while I've been doing this and not why my camera has been switching off. I've been doing 22 gigs of an 86 gig download of Starfield that just became available. But this is the game of games. If you want to do something, it's just sponsored content again.

William Dorrington: 1:17:39
This is not sponsored content.

Mark Smith: 1:17:41
But it is Microsoft content because this is the game. But I'm just saying, as an last weekend I was with my nephew and he on his Xbox, whatever a county's got. He had early access to this and he had taken eight days off work just to play this game. For the next eight days he had taken leave and I'm like, yeah, that's awesome, but this is, you know, it actually reminds me of a game I used to play years ago called Half Life. This is epic. If you're looking for a game of right now, this is the game you want to check out. And with that, mike Drup, come on. What do you guys bring to the table? What's in your news? It's really interesting.

Ana Demeny: 1:18:28
I'm just going to take it back to Copilot for just one second. I've been talking to a few people who have startups, and one of them is my brother, and my brother is a brilliant coder, but with having a startup, he doesn't code every day anymore. So when we're talking about okay, how specialized can you actually be when you want to do more you quickly, you know, find that you're forgetting syntax and things like that. He was telling me the rate at which Copilot is accelerating his own work Because he forgets, you know, syntax or best practices or things like that for certain areas of his own coding experience. And if you've got, you know, a startup and you're pushing apps into AppSource and into Google Play or was the Google Android anyway?

Mark Smith: 1:19:32
Yeah, Google Play sets it.

Ana Demeny: 1:19:34
These platforms. They have certain rules and things like that. So the moment you do something, you need to follow all of those rules and Copilot reminds you of those rules and standards and you make sure that you know everything's set. And these people's perception was the fact that Copilot's going to be and it is right now definitely accelerating their work and their release cycles by at least 20% from senior staff and that they're lowering their productivity in junior staff, which is just fabulous. I don't know if you guys have heard anything like that how co-pilots work really well if you're a specialist, but not as well if you're just starting up.

Mark Smith: 1:20:30
Interesting.

William Dorrington: 1:20:31
So what I was going to come up was backing up the efficiency aspect. So I started rolling out co-pilot across our organization and the feedback has just been phenomenal and this has been going on for a while. We started as a test, like you do, and the one thing that they one bit of feedback and I think we did mention this as well, which is with democratization it does and can, to certain people, create inertia, and the issue is because it is picking up some of the stuff that you might be bored by writing your test scripts and other aspects. They have said they some of them, have started saying, well, I've actually started forgetting how to code certain elements and you're going well, okay, that is that an issue, or isn't it? Is it a case that actually is making life easier and actually you'd have to think about that anymore? Or is it a case that actually is creating a load of lazy coders in the future and that's going to make it even harder to be juniors and seniors? But let's see, but we don't know doing this in new territory.

Mark Smith: 1:21:27
Will there be any coders in five years?

Andrew Welch: 1:21:29
There will be some. That's how AGI goes. I used to build my own computers. Right Now I carry a carry a MacBook, right. So more product placement, but anyway the so. So just because most of us don't build our own computer anymore, doesn't mean that nobody is building the. You know building the thing, so I Mark built his own. There you go Beautiful.

Mark Smith: 1:22:00
I don't. There's no way. I do my gosh. I pay people that do it. Do you know why? Because, honestly, I spec what I want right and then I pay for it to be done. Because computer builders these days it's an art form, Like they know how to every cable is just clipped perfectly, the airflow is, is validated, it's like it's crazy. That's not that old and I'm already looking at a $9,000 replacement for that box that will, that has better grills, that has a faster GPU, of course, and things have just come a long way in the last two or three years.

William Dorrington: 1:22:36
You can create your PowerPoint presentations at double speed.

Mark Smith: 1:22:40
I know right, exactly exactly.

William Dorrington: 1:22:42
But if you do, if you actually do gaming, that makes a lot of sense.

Mark Smith: 1:22:45
Yeah, but if not, yeah. 4k artwork looks amazing on it.

William Dorrington: 1:22:51
I bet especially that game you're downloading Can't wait, yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. But going back to what we were saying about the coding, though it's a bit like everything, everything, at some point everything does start to evolve out. You know, we think about windmills, watermills, all that yes yes, yes.

Ana Demeny: 1:23:06
We start moving on.

William Dorrington: 1:23:07
So you know there will be an evolution of all things. How quick it happens, how fast it happens, who knows? But there is a level of inertia. It's all you start to generate, and that's my biggest concern. I think we discussed this before, and I'm creating a website at the moment that I'm working on, called Data Science Frontiers, which is I'm so concerned that we're at this. We've gone fully into, you know, the AI realm. You know it really has arrived, yet people are throwing their data into it and not actually understanding how it's processing, how it's being used, because it's been democratized sorry, getting quite late in the evening here. So I think actually the educational aspect is so important, yeah, and to not create lazy people just throw stuff in and expect an output.

Mark Smith: 1:23:50
Yeah, I think that it's time for Anna to wrap things up for us and have the last word.

Ana Demeny: 1:24:02
Oh, wow. That's a big responsibility, you know. I'll wrap this up by copying you from last week. Very quickly, Tell me one thing you've learned this week, and if not, why didn't you Mark you go first?

Mark Smith: 1:24:24
I love it. I love it. So right now I'm focused for the last actually three weeks, four weeks maybe, maybe last six weeks on sustainability and we've seen a massive index on the environment component of sustainability. But if you really look at what, you know the full gamut. It's actually environment, it is social and it is governance. So it's ESG, it's these three key layers that we've done a lot around. What are we doing around carbon emissions etc. Very indexed on that? You know the E, the environment part of ECG. But I think that we're going to see a massive growth and this is what I'm learning about. Is that social responsibility and then the governance and the impact. You know EU laws are about to roll If not I don't know if they have already, but about to come out. In this, the US are dropping big laws. I've just worked with a major mining company that is looking at how they manage carbon credits and things like that, and we're building systems for them to do that. So I think this is a massive growth space. That's so. That's what I'm learning about. And then I mean, at the end of the day, this is a massive data play, right? If you look at everything about from our lens as in how does it practically create opportunity? It is a mega data play and from multiple inputs. So yeah, it's exciting.

Ana Demeny: 1:25:53
Cool, awesome, will you're next?

William Dorrington: 1:25:57
Do you know what I'm going to go for? The absolute purist answer, which is away from tech and everything else and just personal life. I've been building an outdoor kitchen and I've got to the countertop and I've been learning how to use this thing called R-dex Feather Finish, which is like concrete and you can only make and I love it, because I'm so hyperactive and I like to do things very quick. You can't do that quick and you only get to make small batches and you have to do it in a very slow manner. And yeah, I've just been really learning that actually stuff like concrete, that's incredibly permanent. You know, learning patience and how to tumult that. So that's what's been a. You know, I did that literally before I came on today and it's yeah, it's been quite a learning course. I'm looking forward to going back out and see how it's dried. To be honest, I like it.

Mark Smith: 1:26:41
I like it. That's my one, hopefully. Hopefully, andrew's had enough time to think about his answer.

Andrew Welch: 1:26:47
Thank you, thank you. So what I have learned this week? I continue to read about this new, this trend of people being called back into the office. So my learning for this week is that the return to office. Stupidity has no bounds, and here's what I mean by this. I read these studies where they, you know and I'm going to pull some numbers out because I don't have them in front of me but 47% of all people who work from home, primarily, are disengaged. But only 42% of people who work in the office are disengaged. And you have these senior executives who are super obsessed about. Well, we need to bring these people back to the office so that they're more engaged. And you're solving the wrong problem here, folks. The problem you really should be solving is why are, why are almost half of your people disengaged, regardless of where they're working? So, return to office. Stupidity has no bounds, and I wonder how long it's going to take before this latest peculiar trend fizzles out. But in the meantime, it seems like we're going to do the maximum to disrupt people's lives for no real appreciable gain. So we'll see.

Mark Smith: 1:28:04
I see Zoom Zoom, which just seems weird to me. Right, they had a big issue around calling people back to the office. Grindr came out yesterday with a lot of controversy. No, grindr came out. No, because they are forcing all their staff back into the office, and that's, you know it's. I think it's a fool's errand. You know this. Forcing people back into the office, it's a silliness.

William Dorrington: 1:28:32
It's focusing on the wrong thing. Like Andrew said, it's focusing on the wrong. If you're in I Andrew, that was brilliant. If your people are disengaged, there's a reason for it. Bring them into an office is not going to change that.

Andrew Welch: 1:28:43
Right right.

Ana Demeny: 1:28:45
Well, actually because I had time. You see, now I've learned. I've learned two things, or rather I've studied a bit of one thing and then learned another. I've studied a little bit about how charity works and how charity organizations work successfully so that they actually help people. You know, instead of, I don't know, deploying mosquito nets that then you know people use for fishing and stuff like that. You know, it's just like, and it's really fascinating, the whole, the whole charity industry, if we can call it that way. It's very interesting and there's a lot to learn. Still, I personally have a problem with some of the habits that some of the charity organizations do have, or not for profit, rather have. I'm just invested in knowing more about those organizations who manage to, you know, build homes, build host hospitals with few resources without having the need to, I don't know, travel business class and so on and so forth. So this is one subject that I'm very passionate about right now. I learned how to so lace on a dress, or on a wedding dress. Rather, I helped my best, my good friend, do that for my own dress, and it's really fascinating dark work and just a vision of each, you know, because it looks like crap at the beginning and it's just, it's just fabulous. That's what I learned this week.

Mark Smith: 1:30:45
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.