Power Platform Scale at Banner Health with Seth Dunn

[Mark Smith]: 2:20
In this episode, we're going to be focusing on scaling with the Power Platform.Today's guest is from Colorado in the US. He works at Banner Health as a consultant.He has developed CRM solutions,restaurant management apps and equipment management solutions for outside business using the Power Platform. You can find links to his bio, socials, etc. in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Seth.

[Seth Dunn]: 2:45
Thanks Mark, happy to join and talk a little bit more about what we're doing as Power Platform.

[Mark Smith]: 2:49
Awesome. I'm looking forward to this. Always love to hear stories from people that are doing this all the time,right? As in, particularly in the organizations,because I come across a lot of consultants that work for partners, Microsoft partners and things like that.And of course they have a different lens on these type of projects as opposed to someone like yourself that lives and breathes it as part of the organization.You understand the culture of your company,that type of thing. So... Before we get into really unpacking that at Banner Health, tell us a bit about you.My guests always like to know a bit of the personal side of who comes on the show. And so what I'm talking about here is, you live in Colorado, which is an outdoors paradise to my understanding.So what do you do for, tell me about food, family and fun. What do you do when you're not working?

[Seth Dunn]: 3:42
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I've been married for 13 years. We have one daughter.She's going into seventh grade next year. A couple dogs, couple cats. We live on a farm out here in Colorado.So that keeps us pretty busy doing stuff around the farm when I'm not working on Power Platform. Food, my favorite's Mexican food. I like it, spicy Mexican food. And we got a lot of that around here.We're pretty lucky with that. As far as fun, I really enjoy traveling with family.We do get up, go to the mountains here in Colorado and enjoy the mountains. We're not skiers or snowboarders like you might expect. I think if you're native from Colorado, it's either something you grew up doing or you just don't do it and I didn't grow up doing it. So we don't do that very often, but I do love traveling around the world with family.

[Mark Smith]: 4:28
I love it, I love it, one thing that pricked my interest then was your farm and I have a small acreage myself and always working on it. What are you into gardening? Are you into animals?What's the story on your farm?

[Seth Dunn]: 4:44
Yeah, it's mostly crops. We have a lot of corn and hay, sometimes beans, more animals. But it's a farm that's been in the family. Actually, it was my wife's family farm. Her great-great-grandfather moved out here and started it, and so it's been in the family since then. Yeah, and I grew up on a farm not too far away. And we had kind of the same story. We've both been farming in the area, our families,for around 100 years. So something we grew up with and definitely enjoy.

[Mark Smith]: 5:11
Very nice, very nice. Tell us about Banner Health first of all. Who's Banner Health, you know, being that the listenership of the show is all over the world,there are people that won't know who or what Banner Health does. So can you give us a bit of an overview?

[Seth Dunn]: 5:26
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Banner is a pretty large health care organization in the Western US. We have about30 hospitals across six different states and of course we run a ton of clinics and providers offices and things like that as well. So pretty large, well over 50,000 employees and we take care of a ton of patients.

[Mark Smith]: 5:46
Wow, wow, I didn't realize 50hospitals, and you come from a country like might in New Zealand

[Seth Dunn]: 5:51
30 I'm sorry.

[Mark Smith]: 5:53
30, well, that's even, right,there's more hospitals than we have in our entire country.Absolutely amazing from a sizing perspective. Tell us about what you do at Banner Health.

[Seth Dunn]: 6:07
Yeah, well, I'll give you a little background. I started with Bayner as a nurse and I did nursing at the bedside for several years. From there, I went into supporting our electronic health record system. So I was helping physicians and nurses and physical therapists and all our clinicians at the elbow if they make the most efficient use of our electronic health record system. And during that time, one of our physicians came to me and asked if there was something we could do with our electronic health record system to send out alerts to physicians faster based off of certain patient clinical conditions. And we couldn't find a way to do it natively inside of our EHR. So we ended up, I was like,well, I've heard of this tool called Power Automate. I don't know if it'll be if it'll do what we want it to, but let's give it a shot and see what we can make happen. So I played around with Power Automate and was able to make it work and function pretty quickly. And we were able to deliver these alerts to physicians' pagers within seconds after certain conditions were met in our health record system.And it kind of just exploded from there. So I started doing more and more power platform builds, and that eventually caught the attention of our intelligent automation team and led me to the position I'm in today.

[Mark Smith]: 7:17
Wow, and so what is that position?

[Seth Dunn]: 7:21
Yeah, so my title is a senior IT consultant, but really I'm leading up the Power Platform COE for Banner.

[Mark Smith]: 7:28
wow, tell me first of all, a bit about your operating model for that. Because you can have a distributed, you can have a matrix model, you can have a DevOps model. What is that for you? How do you run it?

[Seth Dunn]: 7:41
Yeah, it's somewhere around distributed matrix rate. So we have, as a COE, we will build solutions for Banner as an enterprise. We'll also build solutions for individual teams. If they're significantly complex, something that a citizen developer wouldn't be able to put together themselves or require special permissions or that type of thing, then we will build some solutions as a COE. But we really like to focus on our training. So we really like to bring in groups of people, whether they're from HR or finance or whatever department across the organization and put them through our training so that they can go out and build their own solutions.

[Mark Smith]: 8:17
Okay, okay, so this is interesting.So, you know, Microsoft uses term citizen developer and it's quite common,which is people that sit, of course,outside of IT, they have their normal job role function, you mentioned HR, and they know how to do their job, right? And they

[Seth Dunn]: 8:34
Absolutely.

[Mark Smith]: 8:34
don't necessarily know what technology is out there that could assist them to digitize their job and therefore, you know,get the benefits. Automation, real-time alerting,like you talked about before.What's the evangelism program that you have in place? One, for having a department come to you. Do you proactively go out to those departments and say, hey look these other departments are doing this? Is this something you're interested in? How do you get Elgada that initial contact with a new department that wants to do something digital?

[Seth Dunn]: 9:09
Yeah, we don't have a ton of outreach that we do. We've been so busy, people come into us just word of mouth saying,oh, I heard about this other department that has XYZ app that they've got, and I want to learn more about this Power Platform.Teams are constantly coming to us. So we're in a lucky situation that we haven't had to do a lot of outreach from that standpoint.We have made use of some of the COE toolkit. And if a citizen developer goes out there and makes something on their own, they will get an email asking if they want to join our Power Platform user group.So that's kind of about the only outreach that we've really had to do. We have plans to do more outreach, but right now we're so busy with projects. We just haven't had a chance to go after those.

[Mark Smith]: 9:47
Wow. So that made that amazing,right? That's the perfect scenario that most organizations want that appetite for using it and for growth. Tell me about what's the onboarding experience for somebody that gets that email from you and give me a bit of detail. Like are you letting them build in the default environment?What's your, how do you make sure you know They're staying within your digital guardrails. What's your kind of guidance? How do you train them? What's your thoughts there?

[Seth Dunn]: 10:21
Yeah. So governance is something that I think we're a little bit behind the eight ball on is probably a lot of organizations are, is that,you know, citizen makers hear about this power platform and they go nuts building in the default environment, right?So we're trying to get a hold on that.We've implemented a pretty restrictive DLP policy on the default environment.

[Mark Smith]: 10:39
Of course.

[Seth Dunn]: 10:39
And at this point, we're just encouraging people that, you know, if you're wanting to just learn about power platform,try it out, or maybe build an automation, you know, it's just something for your personal use. getting a text when your boss sends you an email or something like that, have fun, go for it in the default environment. If you're gonna be doing something that's gonna be affecting your team at a larger scale and be impacting your team's work or maybe even work beyond your team, then we really need to put you through our formalized training, get you set up with your own development and production environments and teach you how to use those and make sure that you're having your documentation in place so that if you win the lottery next month and you leave the organization,your solution will still be something that we can support.

[Mark Smith]: 11:19
I like it. I like it. Tell me about that training that you put them through.How long is it? Is it an hour?Is it five weeks? Is it, you know, how long does it take?

[Seth Dunn]: 11:32
Yeah, our training program is something I'm pretty proud of and it's worked really well so far. We've put about a dozen teams through that training and it's kind of evolved. Of course, from the first team to the most recent team, it's changed a little bit. We kind of have two sets of training really. We have, if it's something where you don't have a specific use case in mind, you kind of just want to learn more about Power Platform and what you can do and how you build in and get you comfortable with it. We'll meet with somebody just one-on-one for an hour or two, kind of walk them through the basics, get them started. But once they want to take that next step and really start to make some more powerful solutions,we'll put them through our formalized training. And that's usually for a team. So I mentioned we might have HR. So what we like to do is grab at least three or four up to five or six people from a team. And that team is going to become the power platform makers for HR.and we'll put them through our training.Usually they have a use case that they come to us with.And so we'll start out, we'll take a couple sessions, just going over basics,teaching them a little bit about what all the different tools in Power Platform are and what's available to them. And then we'll dive into building their use case. And I give them hands-on training. I make them drive and I walk them through how to build stuff in Power Platform. And then we'll take breaks in between our sessions. So we usually do a two or three hour sessions and then we'll break for a few days and come back to it. And in between those, I encourage them to go out, keep building,keep trying to do stuff. And at our next session,you know, we'll come take care of any issues you came across or help you out with anything that you aren't able to figure out. And usually we'll go as long as it takes to make that solution.So that usually ends up being around four or five weeks. And it's, but it's not full days. It's not full time for four or five weeks. That's right. It's a couple sessions a week for four or five weeks.And then at the end of that, they have not only do they have the skills they need to go out and make additional power platform solution for whatever it is their team needs, but they have a solution that's there and ready for them to use. And that's been really key for us because all of our teams are very busy. So if you come to somebody like, hey, you got this tool, but you're going to have to take 40 hours away from your primary job to learn how to use it.That's pretty big barrier for a lot of our people to overcome.So the fact that we're able to say, hey, give me your time. We're going to teach you how to use this, but you're also going to have something at the end of the at the end of the course.It's going to make your team much more efficient as something that people have been really receptive to.

[Mark Smith]: 13:58

Is there, how do you handle things like, there's probably three things jump to mind straight away. One is HIPAA compliance, right? So you've got your healthcare standards compliance. How do you handle that when you've got people that are just starting to build apps and they're probably not gurus on what the standards are around compliance, as in specifically in healthcare in this scenario. And then, The other thing, how do you address things like component reuse? How do you address things like the app should look like it's owned by banner health. In other words, it should be on brand.And how do you address things like, you know, which a new app developer is not going to think of things necessarily straight out of the gate, like usability, like,how does it work for people that are vision impaired or any of those other scenarios,right? How do you, How do you,is that part of the training program you put in place? How do you handle those kind of use cases?

[Seth Dunn]: 15:03
Yeah, as far as handling private information, it's a mix of what you're doing with the data and our DLP policy. So we cover, don't be tweeting out

[Mark Smith]: 15:17
course.

[Seth Dunn]: 15:18
private health information or something like that, right? So we do go over that, but we also have DLP policies in place that prevent people from doing something like that and leaking data outside of the organization, usability for accessibility is something definitely an area for us to grow.So we don't hold our developers to any specific design standard. And that's mostly because these apps are usually built for their individual teams. It might be 15,20 people or something like that. It's not something that's going to be used organization wide.Now, as the CEO, when we're building something that is going to be used organization wide, we do follow the the style book that's been created by our organization and make sure that we're following the guidelines there. but we don't have a company-wide theme that we say, every app has to adhere to this design standard. So that's something we might want to do in the future.It comes back to time and having the resources to be able to put that together.And then from accessibility, same type of thing. We haven't required our developers to make sure that their apps are accessible from whatever standard you want to set up.

[Mark Smith]: 16:27
How do you handle things like support of the app? You talked about somebody winning the lotto and that's a very polite way of what I often call the bus effect, someone getting hit by a bus and I prefer your way. I think I'll use that from now on. So you know, they're no longer in the organization. How do you make sure that you don't get an orphaned project that has become mission critical but nobody knows how to fix change, iterate on what's there? Um, what's your, what's your standards, your processes around that?

[Seth Dunn]: 17:00
Yeah, so we have some documentation guidelines that are put in place, and that is something we make our teams adhere to. So that's one reason, like I mentioned, let's take our use case of our HR team that's gone through our training. There's four or five people there that are developing apps and automations for our HR department.They are required to have this documentation in place for every solution that they deploy out to production.If all of them bought a lotto ticket together and they all leave banner at the same time, At the very least, we have that documentation in place. Along with that,we do require them to do some source control and we'll keep the zip files of their solutions backed up so that we have those as well.But just having, requiring, like I mentioned, when we put these teams through their training, we do require them to have at least three people.And that's part of the plan, right,is the idea that probably not all three of them are going to leave the organization at the same time. And so that HR team can continue to support, even if one person leaves, the two other people are there and continue to support the solutions that that team have built.

[Mark Smith]: 18:07
Okay that's cool that's cool that that that makes sense. How about what where's the line between IT support right so formal and every organization you have your internal help desk number that you can call because my email is not working today or I've been logged out I've got to reset my password where does that line stop or start for you when it comes to an app's been built And it needs to be, it needs to be supported. Let's say it's, it could be not one of your, your makers apps.It could be the one that comes out of the COE. How,what's the line? Where's the support stop start? How do you handle it?

[Seth Dunn]: 18:54
It really depends what the issue is. So they can place an incident with our service desk and we have an operations team, which we're just starting to get our operations team on boarded with Power Platform. So if they place a ticket,our operations team will be able to go out and look up and say, oh, this is this Power Platform solution. Here's the documentation for this. If they can find whatever the solution is to the issue that's been presented to them, they'll be able to fix it there on the spot. If not,they then reach out to us. as the COE development team and we can go in and look at the issue and work directly with the end user to solve whatever's going on.

[Mark Smith]: 19:30
Nice. What about training on the app? Right? You know, are you creating a bunch of, you know, self-paced videos that people like, and I'm talking about specific to an app that's been built. So are you creating a little, an app archive library of training that you once again get that team to do? How do you handle that?Or do you have a formal process around it?

[Seth Dunn]: 19:50
Yeah, it's not really a formal process. Usually it's gonna be if it's our citizen teams that are building apps, they're gonna handle training with their team, right?So the HR team is gonna go out and work with their staff and to show them how to use the app that they've built.If it's an app that's been built by the COE, we have a few apps that have been deployed organization-wide and those apps, we put out a little paper, you know, one page guide on how to use the app. They're very simple apps, it's nothing too complex.So,We haven't had to do much on training from that standpoint. For the apps that we have built that are more complex,we do work with that team one-on-one. We usually hold training calls and go over the app with them. And then we give them, we put a hyper care period out there after we deploy a solution.So for several weeks after we deploy a solution, it's in hyper care. We're likely to find some bugs that we didn't come across in our testing. So we'll fix those bugs. But there's also just a lot of working with users, how do I do this again?And we can show them at that time.

[Mark Smith]: 20:49
What's the, what's the most complex app that you've built and why do you say it's complex? Like, I know it's subjective, but up to you about, you know,how you answer that.

[Seth Dunn]: 21:01
Yeah, that's a good question. I'd have to say we did build a solution as a COE for our HR team that handles, whenever we get a new employee that comes in, it looks at the information for that employee,what location they're gonna be working at,what position they're gonna be working in. a lot of those factors and it determines what groups across the organization need to be aware that this employee is coming on board.So a lot of us are clinical education folks, they might be hired for a clinical position.And so we'll see which clinical education team needs to be aware that this employee is going to be starting.But it goes beyond that some of our IT teams to provision the access that they're going to need. and a few other groups are occupational health groups and a few other groups across the organization. So there's a lot of factors there that go into determining who needs to know that this employee is going to start. So a lot of working that logic out and but it expanded beyond that to sort of be a tracker for occupational health teams and for our clinical education teams to be able to track this is what this employee is scheduled for.This is where they're at in their onboarding process. All that type of thing.And I think to date we've put nearly,I haven't looked recently, but I think we're pretty close to 20,000 employees that have gone through that solution.

[Mark Smith]: 22:19
Wow, impressive. How do you decide when one of your customers, so one of the divisions inside your organization comes to you and says, and I've seen these apps that have been built, I want an app built for me. And how do you, one, do the cost justification for it? Is that something within that team that, how do you rationalize,if we spend a dollar here on your solution,you know, it's going to have X benefit to the organization where if we spent the dollar over here, it's going to have Y benefit to the organization. And because our backlog is so deep,how do you prioritize that? What's your method model around that?

[Seth Dunn]: 23:02
Yeah. First off, we encourage a lot of our makers that come to us to go through the training and learn to build it themselves if we think it's a reasonable, a reasonable thing that they could build. Right. So that and part of the reason we do that is because a lot of these solutions are of the type where we don't need additional licensing. We don't need a premium license, that type of stuff.So it's not a lot of additional cost. It's just time, time to learn how to use the solution, time to develop it and that type of thing. If they're going to be out there building their own solutions.then it's up to them to manage their time. Is it better for me to spend my day building something power platform or working on process XYZ for my team? That's up to them. If it's gonna be a solution that's gonna be developed by the COE,then we go through a more formalized ROI process and we say, okay,here's the return, here's the time savings we could expect from the solution.If there's a dollar component involved in that, we'll look at that, whether that's additional cost from a licensing perspective or maybe cost savings We don't need this other solution or this other option that a vendor has been providing for us. So we'll look at the dollar savings and the dollar costs there. And then we also look at additional factors.So if it's something that we need to meet a regulatory standard or something like that, that also comes into the ROI.

[Mark Smith]: 24:21
Brilliant.

[Seth Dunn]: 24:22
But it is pretty subjective. We'll look at each solution individually and say,yeah, this is something that we need to do, or this one probably doesn't quite meet at the moment meet our ROI standards and we should spend our time on another solution that we have in our backlog.We do, yeah.

[Mark Smith]: 24:37
Yeah. Do you have a backlog? Is it quite large?

[Seth Dunn]: 24:45
I'll put it, it's probably several months worth of work. I'll put it that way.I don't have the numbers on how many projects we have sitting there, but it's large enough.

[Mark Smith]: 24:55
no. And I just want to want to get that feel. Is it something that you're turning out an app? Like if you were to look at the average of meme, what, what are you producing at, um, of those more complex? Are you talking one a month? Are you talking about one of Fortnite?Well, you know, or what's the, the, the longest timeline, I suppose that you've built a solution and rolled it out to folks.

[Seth Dunn]: 25:19
Yeah, the one that I'm working on right now that is actually just rolling out, and it's been about a year since we started developing that. Now it's got a lot of other pieces to it and a lot of reasons that it's taken a year to put that together. Typically,our average deployment cycle runs about two a month.And that's for usually somewhat more complex solutions, but some of them that aren't as complex as well.

[Mark Smith]: 25:44
Interesting. When you consider the architecture, the underlying architecture of an app, when I'm talking about the COE side of this, sorry, I'm talking about your dev team, right, that are building for the organization. When you look at things like connectors, data sources,are you going to use data versus opposed to something else? Because you talked about the non-premium licensing,which I assume therefore you're going to use.a non-premium data source like a SharePoint or something like that.How do you, you know, you've done the ROI, you've obviously factored in things like, okay, I need some premium licensing, I'm probably going to need dataverse,I need X amount of storage, I'm going to need these connectors. How do you make those decisions around that underlying stuff that happens before you get to that presentation layer of the app?

[Seth Dunn]: 26:39
I'm not quite sure. Do you mean how do we determine what we're going to need to build the solution?

[Mark Smith]: 26:43
so it's what I would call a technical assessment of the project,right? What are they gonna be the technical elements? Like, once again, if you're looking at a citizen developer,they're not going to necessarily know that based on what you're trying to do, it's got a lot of relationships, et cetera,you're gonna need to data verse to do this, right? Then they might not be that experienced.And so you're gonna have a technical person, maybe someone like yourself that goes,you know what? If I was looking at the underlying components, it's gonna need this, this, this, and this. And that's what's going to feed our decision making about what type of solution we're going to deploy. You know, is it going to be model driven or just Canvas? If you go Canvas, then you've got the whole UI piece that you've got to control and decide.They're different decisions, but it affects ultimately what gets built, right?

[Seth Dunn]: 27:30
Right. Yeah, so usually we'll meet with the team and go over, we'll spend an hour,sometimes two hours, and going over exactly what it is that they want built.Depending on the team, sometimes they're really good about laying all the requirements out for us, and sometimes we've got to dig a little bit to get to those requirements. But you're right,the first thing we usually look at is what kind of data source are we gonna have to use for this app? And depending on what type of security do you need around the app, what type of data are you gonna be storing? in that data source,in your automations, what services are you gonna need to be connecting to?Are we gonna need to be connecting to any of the premium connectors that are out there or creating the custom connector?So we just look at that on a case by case basis and dig into the requirements of what it is that they need and then we'll propose a solution from there. And sometimes we'll go back and meet with the team and say, look, this is based off of your requirements, this is what it looks like we're gonna need. And they might say, well, let's let's let's nix let's nix this requirement from the solution and we say Okay, well we can if we're taking that requirement out of it Then we can eliminate this complication and get the app to you a little bit quicker

[Mark Smith]: 28:39
Nice, nice. In hindsight, if you're going to look at what you've done over the last, you know, a couple of years and stuff and built, would you start or take a different direction or change anything about what you've done? And part of this question is, for those listening,what recommendations would you have for folks if they're just at the start of this journey?

[Seth Dunn]: 29:02
Yeah. I think one of the first things to do is to get the COE toolkit installed,because it gives you a really good perspective of what's going on across the organization.And if you don't have that, it's hard to put numbers behind what's going on and get buy-in from your executive team. So when I first got started with Power Platform, I was like, I think this is in pretty wild use across the organization,but I don't know. I don't have any way of seeing how many people are using it or anything like that. So we're able to see a retool installed and we can say,oh wow, you know, this is, there's hundreds and hundreds of makers using Power Platform and gives us some numbers on how it's being used across the organization.And those numbers allow us to get buy-in from our executive team. And that would be first step that I would encourage anybody to take is get that buy-in because if you don't have that buy-in from the beginning, it's harder and harder to overcome the governance debt that you're going to incur.At a lot of organizations, they haven't locked down Power Platform, they don't have governance in place, and so it's out there in the wild and people are doing who knows what with it. Overcoming that, once you realize what's being done with Power Platform, overcoming the years of stuff that people have been creating can be quite a challenge and take up a lot of resources.

[Mark Smith]: 30:20
Yeah, amazing. Before I let you go, is there anything you wanna add?

[Seth Dunn]: 30:28
Oh, nothing comes to mind. Um,you know, I just say I love the community around power platform. I, like I mentioned,I started as a nurse, um, and I had always been computer savvy and tech savvy and enjoyed working, working with tech, but I don't have any formalized training,you know, I've done a little bit of HTML, but I don't know any other coding languages.Um, and I've been able to learn power platform from just from the community and from YouTube videos and searching forums and that type of stuff. And it's been really incredible. A lot of growth has taken place over the past five or six years since I started, I first used Power Automate and that's all thanks to the community.

[Mark Smith]: 31:04
Awesome Seth, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show to share your story. Thanks again.

[Seth Dunn]: 31:11
Absolutely. Thank you.