Revolutionizing Federal Operations: Ed Williams on Power BI, CRM Systems, and Power Platform Integration

Mark Smith: 0:01
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. In this episode we're going to be focusing on enterprise deployments on the Power Platform, dynamics 365, as well as development. Today's guests are from the United States. They work at AndWorks as Power Platform developers and consultants. You can find a link to Ed's bio in the show notes for this episode and with that, welcome to the show, ed.

Ed Williams : 0:43
Thank you very much, Sher. Very glad to be here.

Mark Smith: 0:45
Good to have you on the show. I can't wait to hear your story, being that you've been around this space for a good some time. But to start with, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?

Ed Williams : 0:55
Yeah, thank you very much. So my name is Ed Williams. I am the Senior Solutions Architect here at Handworks. We're a small company based out of Falls Church, virginia, that primarily focuses on the power platform and what it can do for the federal government.

Ed Williams : 1:12
I myself have been doing this for a couple of years now. I've started off working for the federal government as a soldier, then moved into contracting, then moved into being a civil servant, now back into contracting and throughout my entire time working for the federal government or the US federal government, that is we have seen where things like data, be it within reports or be within applications, has always been not so fun to play with. When, a couple years ago, when the power platform really kicked off, when a couple years ago, when the Power Platform really kicked off, I got the itch to really start looking at and see how we could improve what we have within some of our federal spaces, which ultimately made me leaving federal service as a civil servant and going back into contracting and doing some of this work. There are so many great things that we have available to us within the Power Platform, but I truly believe that we can make our federal government better with some of these tools.

Mark Smith: 2:12
I love it. I love it. Before we get underway and listen to your story, tell me about food, family and fun. What do they mean to you?

Ed Williams : 2:21
Food, family and fun. So I am a father of four boys. I've been married for 16 years to my great wife. I live in the state of Maryland. So fun fact about Maryland, it is a cult, not a state. I am originally from the state of Illinois, from Chicago, and now live in Maryland and can tell anybody who has come to the state of Maryland that is very, very true. If you can eat it, you put Old Bay on it. If you can't, put the flag on it, but from there food, family and fun. I am a huge fan for anything that you can put Old Bay on. I'm not the biggest fan of crabs being here in Maryland, so don't fight me on that one, but I do love me some of that. We travel around the US. We have a big old RV. We like to drive up and down the East Coast If you go West Coast we get a chance to. But me and my boys love to get in our big old RV and drive up around because it's so much fun to do.

Mark Smith: 3:17
Nice, I got to say crabs, I think is one of my favorite seafood meats that you can have. They're so sweet, it's so tasty.

Ed Williams : 3:25
If I'm going down like Key West or Florida, like something like that, I'm getting like some stone crab. I can deal with that. I just I've been married to my wife for a very long time now and to watch the love of my life the person who brought my children as a world to devour crabs with her face and then the mustard and everything associated with it. You know what? Maybe not.

Mark Smith: 3:49
That's awesome. That's awesome. Tell me about you know you've talked about your role in the military, things like that. Tell me about how you got into Microsoft tech space.

Ed Williams : 4:00
Yeah, so I am a chief warrant officer in the Maryland Army National Guard. Chief warrant officer is kind of that middle space between what an enlisted soldier is and what an officer is. We are technical experts in our field. I am what is known as a 255 November, a network tech so kind of strange. Some folks I do like large-scale network operations for the Army and Maryland in general, for the Army and Maryland in general.

Ed Williams : 4:23
And then a couple of years ago when I was working for the Navy as a civilian civil servant, at the same time doing guard stuff, I started seeing a lot of stuff with Power BI. So when I was seeing some of the first iterations of Power BI in some of the higher classification spaces where it really paid dividends, we had a big issue where we're doing studies, your classic Excel, whatever libraries you have out there. It was just not up to speed for what we need. So we got the old school Power BI server, installed it and just from there I was hooked Then, seeing everything we could do as far as Power BI and getting some of those just starting with the Power Apps or really what Power BI could do as far as Power BI and getting some of those just starting with the Power Apps, or really what Power BI could do for us and some of our ERP type systems.

Mark Smith: 5:12
Nice, nice, as we jump in now to what I like to call anchor apps, big apps built on the Power Platform that, once installed, and organizations are going to pull them out in a hurry, right, because they are. So you know, you could use the word strategic. They could be mission critical, they could be absolutely have a massive impact on the organization. But before we start, I just want to say to the listeners we will not be mentioning any particular agencies, names, et cetera, in this episode, so you can guess as much as you want. And so, with that, can you tell me a bit about? When you think of Anchor Apps and the projects that you've been on, what comes to mind For me it's with CRM.

Ed Williams : 5:58
It goes down to how CRM is working with finance and budget, because money is what makes the world turn. If we don't have good finance operations, if we don't have good ways of moving things around, we are going to struggle with how we get actual things done. It's like they say in the Army wars are won not only with soldiers. But how are your supply logistics going down? How are you able to pay soldiers? How are you able to get beans, bolts or personnel to the right locations? So it is really for me, anchor applications surround what it means to do finance and operations in regards to some of the CRM type stuff.

Ed Williams : 6:42
But the struggle with getting a lot of that done is things around security and governance. When we have a lot of the movement to the cloud around the federal space, the easy button for a lot of ISSOs, for a lot of security governance folks, is governance. When Power Platform first came out and a lot of the practitioners of these applications are surrounded by the low-code developers of being citizen developers or what have you, that kind of threw a lot of red flags for folks and gave the wrong impression to what it can actually do for some of our large-scale enterprise applications. So we've been having to kind of work it back for the past couple of years and flip the script and really showcase to folks how there is so much security and governance surrounding these tools, how that when we get these big anchor applications, how they can breed into other things. But they really need to first start with you know what does security and governance mean to them?

Mark Smith: 7:44
Yeah, so at a high level. Just give us run some numbers around sizing of projects that you've been on and use whatever metrics that you think is applicable to how you would reference that. Whether you know, I had somebody on recently who implemented the Power Platform for a government agency in a country that managed their entire passport system. So therefore you know millions of users accessing via PowerPages, for example, only 600 actually you know behind inside the agency but, of course, external, facing massive volume of folks. So when you think about that, what comes to mind?

Ed Williams : 8:25
So, yes, something very similar where it's more internal versus the external. We do have some of those, to your exact point, external facing power pages. We are just now getting some of those turned on for some of our external implementing partners, but we have large scale power platform solutions that touch a good number of our one of the agencies we work for a large swath of their customer base it's upwards in the thousands of people using this on a very, very frequent basis.

Mark Smith: 8:59
Awesome, Awesome. So one of the questions that has come out a bit, particularly from enterprise architects that I've heard this, is the platform enterprise grade or there's a perception, because of that citizen developer discussion, that it's not right that if anybody can build on it, is it just Excel in the cloud and there's no rigor around application lifecycle management, there's no rigor around security of endpoints, there's no rigor around standard security practices and considerations, when an organization might have not only PII data but also secret data and really any amount of data sets that have to be kept highly secure, particularly not just from an external potential threat but also from maybe accidental internal People copying a file, sending it to somebody thinking they're doing it internally and put somebody in the email address field that it shouldn't go to as an example, so accidental kind of risk profile. What's your response?

Ed Williams : 10:45
So a lot to unpack there. So when it comes to flipping the script for what we had citizen developers and showing that this truly is enterprise grade, I take it back to it's nothing more than another language. It's nothing more than another server that you're working on. So if you knew how to do governance, if you knew how to do your agile or whatever process you're using, then you can use those same things. It's just a different mechanism to get there and just like you have to take time to understand how SQL works, you have to how different things in AWS, different things in whatever system it is. It is something where we have to go and make sure they understand that this is just as capable even more capable at times for using some of that stuff. And that really is on the enterprise architects and the solution architects working with those security governance folks and really detailing out and showing how things like auditing and things like concatenation data because you brought up a very good point where there is a particular issue when you have data type A and data type B, and when data type A and B are together, they make data type C, which is a whole other level of thing that nobody should be talking about or looking at. So how do you build in those controls to do some of that stuff? And these are things where dataverse things, where the Power Platform are just natively available to do that. It may not from the surface look like it, but there there it just takes time or it takes education for these enterprise architects to truly understand what it is.

Ed Williams : 12:25
Because it has been a struggle for the past couple of years to really move from that citizen developer slogan to showing how this is more than that. And I think our company and others in our arena have really been able to push that over the past couple of years or a year or so by really starting with some of the citizen developers and making those anchor point, anchor applications. And they go oh well, I can now do this, well, I can do this. And can you show me how the security worked on that thing? Oh, I didn't know I could do that.

Ed Williams : 12:57
I didn't know I could do the comm level security like that. I didn't know I could do hierarchy security like that. I didn't know I could just have business units. I didn't know I could do those things. And a lot of times it takes experimentation on developer standpoint, it takes just brown bags, whatever it may be, because again, the shortcut to no is security saying no, I don't think there's enough governance around this, I don't like it and they want to pull it back. Or you know what? We know how to go build a server. We know how to go build our own database. We're going to go, you know, have all the people go do that. But you know we're just going to relegate over this power platform stuff, building step trackers or whatever crazy little Wimbosh things out there.

Mark Smith: 13:43
Yeah, have you done anything in the licensing space for your customers and I don't mean on what licenses, what fit, but what I find with large enterprise organizations is that they almost need a tool to automate license allocation and, for want of a better term, license retrieval around the allocating of licenses and then bringing the licenses back into the common pool for reuse elsewhere, whether it be people leave the organization, a team gets disbanded, whatever A number of reasons, apa gets retired. Have you built anything or addressed this kind of use case?

Ed Williams : 14:34
There's actually a couple things with that. So the first part is explaining what licensing actually means, because we meet with a lot of customers and one of the first things they think about is they call it the Dataverse license. The Dataverse license Well, no, no, no, it's not the Dataverse license. It's a premium license that gets you this and this and this and that and all these other things, and Dataverse is to be one of the things inside of there. So that's one of the first things that we really want to make sure, when we're having that license discussion, that people understand what's going on. And then to your question about pulling licenses in and out and how do we manage some of that stuff. A lot of that is I'm really looking forward to it. We have something where the auto-claim policy so the auto claim policy, so like the auto claim policies within the PowerApp platform to pull PowerApp's premium licenses in and out just like you would a PowerPage or something that we're looking forward to use a lot more here within our sovereign cloud.

Ed Williams : 15:29
But right now a lot of it is based upon we structure it on team, so we have an overarching O365 team that has a where we give licenses available there, and then we have a power app where, as you just come in there, we have that approvers Okay, give this personal license, take this license away, because we have people come in and out of teams. We have people that shift to different places around the world. Maybe their organization is going to give them a license now. So we need to be able to not only take those away, but not take those away if they got a new one from their new organization all that kind of stuff. So a lot of times it's based around. We have a very simple way, just a very simple MDA. We put a Canvas app on front of there to allow some of that stuff, but the first part of it is just getting that O365 team, because that's a really simple way for us.

Mark Smith: 16:23
Nice. Tell me about fusion teams and how do you think about this? How do you think about standing this up inside an organization that you're working with? And I'll just say one thing I know that a fusion team can have this term citizen developer within it, but I tend, in the way I segregate it in my mind, is that you have citizen developers who can build solutions for personal productivity. One of them might get elevated to a broader use case, but there's going to be a lot of other rigor that's going to go around that in that use case scenario. So let's put that over to one side.

Mark Smith: 16:59
In my mind, fusion Development is what I would call your more traditional development that's been around for the last 20 odd years in the Microsoft space. That originated with Dynamics or MSCRM originally. That is, you have a robust team of specialists. There'll be subject matter specialists, there will be developers, there will be architects, there'll be analysts, testers, project managers, program managers, et cetera, et cetera. And change managers Because I program managers, etc, etc. And change managers because I know that people listen to the show and know how important I believe change management is.

Mark Smith: 17:34
Tell me how do you think about fusion teams and how do you explain that to folks that you need to as part of a project?

Ed Williams : 17:41
I'm really glad you showcase it in that way that it's not just your traditional software developers and local developers working together making magic. It's more than just that. You really have to have everybody from your scrum master, your project manager, everybody involved inside of this. And because I think that's where a lot of people lose the love language of what software development is when you say, oh well, it's just these two teams working together doing good stuff. So when we like in our organizations we typically build applications, we have the product manager, we have that, or the team lead who is managing the day-to-day operations. See what's going on. And then if there are specialized, things need to be put out, like if we need to build a specialized website. Things need to be put out Like if we need to build a specialized website, or we need to maybe have some sort of specialized code that's like a NET type application that's going to be concatenated with this local application, like how those things are going to be melding together.

Ed Williams : 18:39
One thing that we try to do when making a lot of this stuff is how do we actually manage that workload? How do we actually manage the product owners? How do we manage the workload? How do we actually manage the product owners, how do we manage the stakeholders, how do we manage a lot of that stuff, and I personally built our own product management tool within the Power Platform. We did this for a number of reasons. First off, it allowed us to do experimentation on Dataverse Power Platform how we can build our own code to then give to our customers, because we like the adage of eating your own dog food. If by golly I'm not willing to use it every day, then why should I expect my customers to use it every day? So we built this low-code project management tool that allows us to track everything from sprint cycles to what's going on with the code as it's pushing through Power Platform pipelines, as it's going through the solutions, tracking all that kind of stuff all done in one single pane of glass there.

Ed Williams : 19:43
With that project management tool it's grown a lot. Initially it was just it was an idea that we had out there in a SharePoint list and evolved into a project. That evolved into Dataverse tables and all this great stuff. But I'm a huge advocate for using this tool for us at least because it allows us to really experiment with what the tools can do and how we can make our customers' lives better and through that we're able to then enhance our conversation with our security governance team, with our EAs, because then they themselves are in the tool every day, making decisions for how we're going to be promoting code, how we're going to be maybe not promoting something, deprecating something or whatever. So then they can make educated decisions as to how they can then go use these tools themselves in other projects. Or when somebody asks them about building something for a customer, they go oh well, you know what? We kind of already solved this internally ourselves with a power platform type solution. Maybe we can go do the same thing and it's actually happened quite a few times now where our customer goes. You know what? We already did this let's just spin off this module and go throw it over the fence with this team here. So I'm a huge advocate for doing it.

Ed Williams : 21:00
It's not suited for everybody. I will. If you are somebody who loves your ADO, you love your Jira, go for it. This is something that's worked very, very well for us, particularly in helping educate people on what the Power Platform is and how it is to be used. It also really helps junior developers get up to speed, because if you have folks who are coming out of the platform very new and they may have messed with some Canvas stuff, a little bit of Dataverse, but they're really wanting to understand. Okay, how does JavaScript work with inside of an MDA? Or how do I integrate Power BI pipelines with Power Platform pipelines? Using this tool allows us to accelerate a lot of that stuff.

Mark Smith: 21:42
Nice. Is that something that's up on AppSource? It is, or is it just really with your clients?

Ed Williams : 21:48
So actually I have the whole thing on GitHub. I have a blog where I walk through the entire thing on how to do it, so feel free to copy it at your will. Yeah, yeah, it is a lot of fun. I make updates to it all the time. I'm actually working on a solutions watcher right now for managed environments.

Ed Williams : 22:05
One thing that against security is a big thing I hit on because I used to be a security guy for many, many years was what happens when people want to go download a solution, go download a PCS solution and you want to install it inside their environment. Who approved that? Who said, yes, you can put that there. No, you can't put that there. So, being able to not only see what's being installed inside of each of your solutions, your dev, test fraud or whatever it may be, but then put some approvals around it and then, if you didn't approve it, delete it out of there.

Ed Williams : 22:38
So stuff like that, yeah, and doing things before makes its way up into production. Doing things at the lower levels, yes, doing things at the lower levels, yes. So that's a big part that I've been working on. I'm just about ready to publish it out there. I was actually looking at another post right before I got on the call with you. So it is a. I really really like the project. I really like the solution. I really hope that more people will look at it and build it yourself and see how it works for you Because, as I said, it works great for us and it works great for getting people on board with how to use these tools.

Mark Smith: 23:09
I like it. Send us the link and we'll get that in the show notes so people can click on it and go see it. My final question I kind of want to wrap with is really looking at. You know, my career started 20 years ago over 20 years ago with MSCRM right, which, incidentally, if you look at the OG tool that Microsoft purchased, it was purchased by guys that were in the military that used it for IED tracking. It was the OG tool way back in the day, so it actually has its foundations there.

Mark Smith: 23:45
But if we have a look across that period, there's the risk and I have been guilty of this of looking at back then Dynamics CRM as the golden hammer. I could build anything I wanted with this tool. I've built stupid things with this tool and sold them. The worst, I feel stupidly, this is when it was on-prem, non-cloud right was a payroll system that ran inside Dynamics 365 sales, as we would call it today. And then the risk then in the age of the power platform, is we then no longer have just a golden hammer, we have a golden toolbox, which is everything in the power platform right.

Mark Smith: 24:29
And I feel that sometimes, because of this history and this legacy that people, particularly consultants, recommending solutions. They don't go outside that toolbox, fundamentally because they don't know what's outside the toolbox and so therefore, they don't want to recommend something that they are, one they're not up to speed on, and they've sat so long in this one area, Like back in the day it used to be finance and operations or Dynamics 365, ax and NavVision, et cetera, against CE, and it was even walled at the Dynamics level. But if we go higher up, then we've got Azure, we've got M365, we've got all the great stuff. The latest stuff like Fabric and Purview and so many other pieces are now part of that tooling. And then we stick outside the Microsoft ecosystems and we're plugging into things like SAP and ServiceNow and any number of X, you name it.

Mark Smith: 25:29
And for years, my concern in recent times is seeing this golden toolbox type view of things. How do you handle this? And when you look at the enterprise projects you've been involved in, how much are you really stepping outside that tool set, particularly around accessing datasets et cetera, that don't just sit in either the Microsoft ecosystem or you know, I was talking with somebody recently who did this passport implementation system and there's certain biometrics type software that isn't sold by Microsoft right, it is a third party solution in the security space around this, so there's always going to be these integrations and sometimes other tools are fit for purpose. What are your?

Ed Williams : 26:11
thoughts. I love the question and as actually I'm going to steal an answer that I heard at a conference, so if I know SharePoint, I know Power Apps, I know SAP, I got that SharePoint hammer, I got that SAP hammer and by golly, every problem that comes my way I'm going to beat it with that hammer. It may not be the right tool for the job, but by golly I'm still going to hit that problem. And then that's actually a really it's a hard thing to get out of Because I come from network operations guys. I did large-scale network operations. Cisco was my answer to everything Cisco, cisco, cisco. And then the Cisco Firepower came out and I hated it. And then, because they came out with the security test and I didn't do great on the Cisco Firepower certification test, I was like no. So I went and learned Palo Alto. I was like, oh, this is so much better. Why wasn't I doing this for years? So yeah, getting out of that bailiwick of things you feel comfortable with is definitely a hard thing to do and fortunately, within our particular sphere, it's something we have to do. We are not.

Ed Williams : 27:17
Any number of our datasets are usually within multiple locations. There's going to be some things within a lot of things In SAP. A lot of things are going to be maybe in some SharePoint type stuff. A lot of stuff could be in AWS type databases. They're going to be all around because different decisions we're making different times.

Ed Williams : 27:37
And one thing I really like to showcase to people when using the Power Platform is it can be that center.

Ed Williams : 27:42
It doesn't have to be the answer for all your things. It may not be the database for you, it may not be the database for you, it may not be the app for you, but it can be something that can help move things and connect things. So it's hard to get out of that mindset Like this is like I feel comfortable. I know I can fix this problem using this. It may have to take a little while and I may have to do some really interesting things and I may have to spend a little more time versus if you went with a purpose-built tool for the operation or you let data stay where it's at today and simply connected maybe your power platform solution to a virtual table or you use some of those SAP connectors within the power platform, or maybe it's not a power platform solution you need to be building, maybe it's something that needs to be something else, but it's about educating security governance folks for how to be better with all these tools.

Mark Smith: 28:39
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.