Scaling with the Microsoft Power Platform with Em D'Arcy

[Mark Smith]: 2:12
In this episode, we're going to be focusing on the COE. Now, it could be center of excellence, could be center of enablement, but how do you scale it when we're talking about the Power Platform? Today's guest is from Philadelphia,Pennsylvania in the US. She's a Senior Solution Architect at Hitachi Solutions America. She's a proud cat person,parents, sorry, of two boys, Oscar and Louis.She enjoys spending time learning and teaching others about the infinite possibilities of dynamics and the power platform.You can find links to the show notes for this episode in this podcast. Em, welcome to the show.

[Em]: 2:54
Hey Mark, it's been a minute, how are you doing?

[Mark Smith]: 2:58
Really good, really good. We just worked out before you jumped on that the last time you were on the show was 2021. So time is flowing.

[Em]: 3:06
I can't believe it's been that long and even in the last couple of weeks since I spoke to you I've actually gotten a promotion. I'm now the director of Low Code.

[Mark Smith]: 3:15
Wow, the director, that is awesome. That is awesome.

[Em]: 3:17
I know! Yeah.

[Mark Smith]: 3:18
Hopefully you got a fat pay rise with that as well.

[Em]: 3:21
Hitachi take care of me.

[Mark Smith]: 3:22
Good, good, good. It's still,Hitachi is the one company that's really, you know, risen to the top from the number of MVPs, the number of,you know, it indexed heavily on low code earlier. I think that a lot, even though, you know, it was well into dynamics beforehand.So, good company to work for.

[Em]: 3:43
Yeah, for sure. I mean, we have the legend Mr. Joel Lindstrom at the helm of things for low-code. So, you know, you really can't go wrong with having him lead up all of the team there. So it's been a roller coaster.Every single week, there's something brand new happening. And it's just it's so hard to keep up.

[Mark Smith]: 4:00
So, you know, I always like to do intro to guests, but you've been twice on the show already. What I would love you to do is just give us a little update around, you know, the moves that you've made in Philly. And you know, I have recently, of course, seen an amazing photo of where you're living. Tell us about life in Philly, why you love,why you chose to live there after, you know,coming from Ireland originally.What does it for you there?

[Em]: 4:30
So Philadelphia is really interesting.Since we've chatted, I've gotten married recently.I got married back in November of last year.

[Mark Smith]: 4:37
congratulations.

[Em]: 4:37
I have a wonderful, wonderful spouse. We now have three cats. It just seems that we just keep accumulating animals.I love Philadelphia because it's really,it's really gritty. Like I know that everyone says that about Philly, but when you live here, it really is like, it's, can I swear or no?

[Mark Smith]: 4:54
Yeah, you can do whatever you want.

[Em]: 4:56
I can. Great, well our motto is fuck around and find out and that's really the attitude of the city. Like if you screw someone over, you're gonna know about it.And it's just, they very much respect individuality. So as a queer person who's married to a transgender man, it's great, we just get to be ourselves and nobody really bothers us. So there's a real nice element of freedom in getting to be who you are.

[Mark Smith]: 5:18
nice so important I hate people other people interfering in my life ever um and but I think you missed something um last time I talked you didn't mention a dog then don't you have a dog as well

[Em]: 5:31
We don't talk about him. He still exists,unfortunately, but I try to pretend he doesn't.

[Mark Smith]: 5:38
I noticed you skipped over. Anyhow,we're going to talk about the Power Platform. I think last time I was talking to you, did a pee on something while we're talking? I don't know. It was doing something that was bothering me.

[Em]: 5:49
There's a solid chance. Existing, he was breathing.

[Mark Smith]: 5:52
That aside, the Power Platform, you've now been involved in it probably since its nexus when it started. You know,I think I first met you in Amsterdam all those years ago when you entered the community and seemed to be getting really involved. What have been the highlights for you when it comes to the Power Platform and even the way your career has moved with those highlights and transitions?

[Em]: 6:25
That's such a great question. I think for me, the highlight of the Power Platform is how it's now being taken seriously.So the last two or three years, we've really seen it being seen it growing and actually being used for the purpose of which it was developed for, which is creating business solutions for citizen developers.And if you love or hate that term, it doesn't really matter. Essentially business users being able to create their solutions

[Mark Smith]: 6:46
Yeah.

[Em]: 6:46
so that IT folk can focus on the cool stuff and the important stuff. So seeing it grow from everyone just like creating these like fiddly little apps or little games or whatever to being accepted and respected as an enterprise platform is really exciting. I think,and you can see that as well with, we'll talk a little bit about AI, I'm sure. How can you not talk about Power Platform and ignore AI? But seeing it just take center stage at things like builds and things like ignite and inspire, it's a core part of the power of the. Microsoft stack now and it's getting the respect it finally deserves.

[Mark Smith]: 7:23
Yeah, so, so true. Do you, how do you handle a scenario? You go into a customer,and because you talk about the respect that it's deserved, but I still find I go into customers and they see the word low code. So they, in their mind,they go, this is not an enterprise solution.We'll put it over here. Our developers will build our enterprise solutions inside the organization. We'll use other things like Pegger. um, you know, blue prism,Appian, any number of, of those other things in the app landscape because a low code platform,you couldn't run enterprise software on it. And, and I struggle with it being that I've spent 20 years of my career in the space and the power platform is the removal of the dynamics, right?Part of, of the technology to enable us to build any type of solution across my career, built massive solutions,um, on what we now call the power platform.How do you address that with customers?How do you address the, where there's a mindset issue with architects or senior stakeholders, that is the mindset is due to lack of education. They've taken marketing phrases and that's it.They've made up their mind.

[Em]: 8:39
That's a really great question. And it's something I face quite regularly. I think it depends on the audience I'm speaking to.If it's a customer that's comfortable with Dynamics, understands Dynamics, hitting them with Dynamics is just a really souped up power app. And that kind of starts to turn on light bulbs. You know, when you start, I mean, Model Driven apps are the OG low code apps. I don't care who you are, fight me.They are low code.

[Mark Smith]: 9:01
A hundred percent.

[Em]: 9:02
So when you start talking about that and being like, well, if they're not complex, how come you're running your entire sales org on top of this app? And then they go, oh,OK, that makes sense. Then a conversation is had if the customer I'm speaking to has a large number of developers in-house.The conversation needs to change a little bit,because you have the issue of developers starting to either feel threatened, or like you said, they'll completely disregard the platform. There is something to be said about the power of fusion development as well. So fusion development, for those who aren't familiar with this term, is the ability for pro-devs and citizen devs, or business users, to come together to create a business solution.And when you start to tell Prodats, hey,you can use the Power Platform to build your custom development apps if you want to.I mean,just leverage your business users to create the interface. I don't know a lot of developers that want to spend time fiddling with this button goes two pixels to the left or this should be blue. Like most developers I know don't care about that. They want to get to the logic and the complex things and the automation and all that kind of stuff.So when I tell those types of developers,hey, you don't have to worry about that. Let your business users customize what the interface is gonna look like. You get to do all the cool stuff such as utilizing Azure to as your backend and spinning up all of your resources. And I don't know what any of those words mean. I'm just saying things I've heard my colleague who does Fusion Dev say,

[Mark Smith]: 10:19
That's what you should test, babe. Yeah.

[Em]: 10:21
do all those things and leave the boring stuff that you consider boring to the business users. And I think it becomes really powerful once you figure that out, but it's not just low code, it can be Fusion code too.

[Mark Smith]: 10:35
Yeah. What about talking to, I don't know, in your role, whether you come across those that are responsible for security?How do you, how do you set their minds at ease?

[Em]: 10:49
So this is my area of expertise. I think if you were going to have a conversation about the Power Platform, it is incredibly negligent to not at least tackle the word governance.It's kind of a boring thing to talk about,but it's so, so important because we've seen in the past with things like SharePoint and Teams and things like that. If you don't have a good handle on it, things can spiral out of control really quickly and you have things like sprawl. So it's really important that And especially now with AI,and I'll get into that too in a second,it's really important that from a security standpoint, you're setting up the digital guardrails to ensure that when your business users are leveraging the platform and learning on the platform, that they're not putting the business at risk by accidentally tweeting out production data, like here,or all of our cost prices for, et cetera.So it's really important to ensure that the guardrails are put in place and having those conversations and putting security teams at ease. Like, hey, yeah, we can do these guardrails for you. What do you want me to set up? We can do a number of different ways. We can do that. But then your business users will also be able to build things and you can kind of sit back and breathe and realize there's no major risk here. And I think that's incredibly important, especially with Power Pages becoming more and more popular as well.I am hesitant to call PowerPage as a citizen developer tool just because of the fact that there's so much risk involved there with being able to put all of your production data on a website for anyone to access for their authentication. So there's security that needs to be put in place, but once the security is in place,the benefits that you're gonna read because of that are phenomenal.

[Mark Smith]: 12:33
Yeah, yeah, so true. How, tell me a bit about how you normally would engage on a new project where it's green fields, there's not a single app, there's not a single automation power.And it's very unusual. I mean,I can't even think of an account that I've ever been in that didn't have anything, but let's say they're pretty much at ground zero, but they have strategically said,you know what, this is a platform. that we want to get serious about, it's going to be part of the ecosystem that we have in place in the organization. What's the typical journey you would take them on over a three, six month period?

[Em]: 13:16
That is a really great question. And you're dead on, I don't know any customer I've gone in. I've gone into customers who've said,no, we're not using the Power Platform. I'm like, I bet you are. I promise you are.But in these unicorn scenario where they're not,it's important to set up those digital guardrails and to have visibility and set yourself up for success. There's the crawl walk run approach, which I think we've all heard of, but it's really important to. Create your digital guardrails. And what I mean by digital guardrails to get actually into the weeds is things like environment strategy is really important. How do you want your makers to use the platform? How do you want them to develop? What does application lifecycle management look like for these different solutions? Because low code does not mean low complexity. And I think that's something a lot of people don't understand.You'll still follow things like... code management and application lifecycle management.All that slightly different to how you would do it with traditional code, but the principles still apply. Like we still use agile methodology when we develop for our clients using low code. So that's really important to remember.The other side of digital guardrails are data policies, as they're now called. So ensuring that you have a good handle on your connectors because the place where things can get messy from a... business user perspective and a data perspective is connectors. That's where you're going to do the damage. So ensure you know what connectors are available, ensure you're comfortable with doing things like business and non-business and blocked connectors and having all of that set up. Once that's all good, you would start to then move to a maker enablement strategy.With the introduction of copilot for the Power Platform, which if you're not familiar with the do, Google Build and look at Day 2's keynotes from Charles Lamanna, and he has a great presentation on that. This means that Maker Enablement is going to be accelerated very quickly because Copilot now allows you to literally type in, I want to create an app to record event registrations,and it will create the tables for you.It will create a very basic dummy data. It will create very simple Canvas app for you, whole thing, but it gets your makers going.And that's really cool, but you also need to think of what are your business use cases?So in order for the platform to be adopted successfully, you have to have a decent backlog of things that are going to impact the business in a way that people will go, that's really cool. This is something that we can use in our department and get people excited about it, because if you don't create a buzz, it's not gonna get adopted. So a couple of key tips.

[Mark Smith]: 15:54
Yeah, nice, nice. You've mentioned AI a few times, and I'd be remiss not to talk about it in the concept of governance. What do you think, you know, we know AI is gonna permeate everything.I even, something I've been discussing with colleagues is will there be a concept of low code, no code within five years? In other words, will it be, don't you just tell AI and it will build?you know, a co-pilot that we have now is version zero, right? Imagine five years from now, right? Once that toddler is growing up, what are we gonna have? We'll be a very educated system. From a point of governance, what are your thoughts?

[Em]: 16:37
A couple of things. First and foremost, the version of Copilot that we have right now, it is technically in preview and there are some issues with it. My example of creating that Canvas app with event registrations, the AI does not realize some of these tables may already exist. So if you have makers using Copilot, it may create duplications of tables. Like you may end up having five different tables called events. And as a maker, I don't know how to pick what the right one is. So hopefully they mitigate that in the future, but that's an issue with sprawl. So ensuring that you have copilot only turned on in your trainer environments, it should never be turned on in production

[Mark Smith]: 17:14

100%.

[Em]: 17:15

ever, ever. So that's really important.But the other side of that is your makers are going to learn how to use this platform far faster than previously anticipated. So getting your guardrails in place now is more critical than ever. AI is here to stay, it's not just a fad, it's going to get smarter, it's going to get better, but in order for us to be responsible, you have to stay on top of it and ensure those guardrails are in place because now with Co-Pilot for Power Pages,and I'll always go back to Power Pages as my example, because it's the most dangerous one there is,a maker can go in and say, I wanna create a website that displays all of my event registrations.all of a sudden you've got all of your customers information out there on the web and it's your own fault if you did not set up those security guardrails correctly.

[Mark Smith]: 18:08
Really good example using PowerPages there. As you've been drilling into AI more and you know we're soon going to have AI directly on the desktop with Windows,which I think is going to be a massive game changer. Especially if it learns everything that I do and then starts showing me how... either I could do it more efficiently or even better go, you know what, I can do it for you and that level of trust,you know, AI is going to be a trust journey, right? Over the next five years, our confidence,our trust levels will grow. We will hand off more of our lives to it. And how do we ensure things, you know, and I want to talk about just ethics for a moment,but really from a power platform perspective,not ethics around AI and the world and stuff. plenty of debates around that. What do you think around ethics and responsibility for and how you talk with organizations in the context of the Power Platform?

[Em]: 19:14
I think it's really important. One of the key takeaways I'm hearing from customers when we talk about AI and they're going to call AI things like chat GPT. Every customer I speak to calls it chat GPT when it's not bad. But anyway, that's another conversation is teaching them that you can set it up so that your models will only utilize your own data internally and that data does not get sent out externally. It's important that you leverage a partner to help you do that if you're not super savvy, because you don't want to set up a direct connector to open AI that leverages a GPT model. That's one of the standard GPT models. Cause all of a sudden, if you're, you put that in with PBA as an example, or power virtual agents,you start, your employees start leveraging that and all of your data is going to be going out to the public chat GPT model.And I know if I remember correctly, I think it was Samsung. I think it was Samsung actually turned. turned off blocked access to chat GPT to all its employees because that data was getting out into the open world. So it's really important that if you are gonna leverage AI, make sure you know how to use it. And if you don't know how to use it, hire someone. It's kind of like electricity or an electrician.You probably know enough to be dangerous,but you're also one or two tweaks away from potentially killing yourself. So hire an electrician, hire a partner.

[Mark Smith]: 20:33
I like it. I like it. I like it.If we could, if we looked at the maker community inside an organization, think about what has created phenomenal growth in that community. You know, is there a tip to make it go viral? As in, what have you seen that really has organizations that have adopted the platform.And so they're thinking not of five or six apps, they're thinking of thousands of apps, they're thinking of thousands of automations. What have you seen that really creates a viral nature in their maker community that really has it spread across departments, across teams, across individuals challenging other individuals to to learn more and to create that viral nature. I'm saying, yeah, how do you create a virus inside of Maker Community that has everybody wanna be part of it?

[Em]: 21:38
That's a really great question. I love this question because it's very difficult.There's no one answer to it. And I kind of hark back to the model that we have at Hitachi because I mean, I feel like this is a bit of a cop out because we have so many amazing makers at Hitachi.But giving them a place to share ideas and to consult with each other and to ask each other questions is really, really important.I cannot emphasize that enough. It's not enough just to give people the tools to do so.you have to give them a place to talk about it. So within, it's not technically part of the COE, but Microsoft did release a template,which I think is the community template that you can use for the Power Platform, and it allows you to create a SharePoint site that is kind of like a forum, where if you have questions, you can ask questions,post them, you could do some gamification there if you wanted to. I think the nurture components within the center of excellence or center of enablement,whichever one you want. call it is really great. There's the app catalog that allows you to showcase the finest apps that your makers have created and share them out. So it's kind of cool. I could be like, oh hey I'm featured on the app catalog this week,you know, it's kind of like bragging rights a little bit.But you need to identify who those makers are and you cannot do that without your governance tools such as your Center of Excellence Starter Kit which will allow you to see who's making what, what are they making, who's using it. That'll help you get a feel for who your super users are and you should leverage them to evangelize the platform.And a key thing that a lot of employers are missing is that you need to invest in these people. It's not enough to just take them and leverage them as the evangelists. You need to invest in them. And a really easy way of doing that is send them to conferences,send them to the Microsoft Power Platform Conference.When I went last year, I was blown away by the number of people who were. new to Power Platform and had just discovered Model Apps as the cool new application. I was like, please, I've been doing this for 12 years.

[Mark Smith]: 23:37
Exactly. Yeah.

[Em]: 23:40
But yeah, invest in your makers. You can't just plug in this platform and expect it to run itself. You have to make some investment in your people.

[Mark Smith]: 23:47
How do you, one of the questions that I've noticed just recently coming out of the UK is that, and I don't know if it's very British or what, but there's this whole idea of segregation of duties is not the right term. But let's say, I'll give you an example that we were always taught as Kiwis about people in the UK and about unions and things like that, is that if you're That's what you're paid to do.If you saw a piece of rubbish on the floor and you picked it up, and this is extreme of course and I'm doing it on purpose,is that if you picked it up and put it in the bin you just took somebody else's job. Someone was paid to pick up that bit of rubbish and now you're taking it from them and of course that was the extreme of unions, you know, and how I was brought up in a parochial country like New Zealand is.The thing is, if we go and look at this now in context of maker inside organizations,I am a subject matter expert in whatever my job is. It might be in the accounts department, an expert in payroll.And now you're asking me to build apps. Now you're asking me to automate use software and automate, but I'm not an IT, I'm not an IT person. How do you handle that kind of... Even a worry, maybe from leadership,that hang on, if they're going to be building apps, they're not doing what they're employed to do. How do you tackle it?

[Em]: 25:20
That is a great question. And it's truly the whole reason why the Power Platform was created was to essentially allow you to automate some of those really boring tasks.And I'll give you a really great example.Working with this brand new customer. And he says to me that every Saturday, he has to put together this report by pulling all these fields into Excel and putting things together and a whole bunch of really manual steps. And I said to him, I think I can give you back your Saturdays. So could you imagine as a person, I have to spend time off doing this just because I know this report is done and I don't have time during my day to do it. If you were given a tool that let's say two or three weeks from now you could automate that process and get your Saturday mornings back. Apparently his spouse wasn't delighted about him getting his Saturday mornings back but that's neither here nor there.Being able to give time back so that you could do some of the cool stuff or what are the list of things you have that you're like oh one day I'll get around to doing that.Being able to say, well, what if that one day was three weeks from now and you automated all the stuff that was really, really boring. It's not a case of, you know, this is going to take away from your job. It's actually going to enhance it. It's actually going to give you time back to be more innovative and creative and production productive. And that's, that's the angle I try to take at it.

[Mark Smith]: 26:35
Yeah, nice. I mean, these people always been in organizations, they've been the Excel gurus, right? The go-to,but who's that person that's the go-to that know enough about it, but also know their day-to-day job? Interesting.Naming conventions for makers.

[Em]: 26:51
Is this?

[Mark Smith]: 26:51
You know, Slumberjay agent 001,002, et cetera, and amazing. We've seen things like Power Rangers and things like that. In creating that community environment, have you seen anything like, let's say, glue stickiness that kind of makes people feel a sense of pride as being part of this part of the company?

[Em]: 27:19
Yeah, I have. There's a couple of things that kind of come to mind. And for some reason,I immediately almost think of like the MVP community that we're both really humbled and honored to be part of, I think is the phrase I'm legally bound to say.When you get that kind of recognition of, oh, hey, I did this cool thing and somebody recognizes like, yeah, actually, that is pretty cool. And they get to share that out. I think that's something that's really special. And when I when I look actually. Again,I like to look at Hitachi internally.We recognize when our colleagues do really excellent things and we are encouraged to call that out. And I think if you foster that sense of recognition and others,I think that's incredibly powerful.

[Mark Smith]: 28:05
Yeah. Awesome. And we're at time.Anything, actually, one last question is in managed environments. What are your thoughts? What do you take on them? Are they relatively new in the sense of only the last 12 months? What are your thoughts and how critically important?Are they in the enterprise? I'm not talking about smaller power platform deployments in the SMB, but particularly in the enterprise space, we're talking about thousands of staff potentially using apps and solutions with the Power Platform. Watch your views.

[Em]: 28:40

I think that they have a place, but they're not a silver bullet for governance. I worry a little bit that people are going to say, oh cool, managed environments. Now that's going to make my governance plan so much easier. I'll just leverage them and then I won't have to worry about data prevention policies or anything like that.So while I think there are great steps in the right direction and they can certainly be leveraged, I don't want people relying on them as their sole source of management.

[Mark Smith]: 29:06
Yeah. Em, thanks so much for coming on the show.

[Em]: 29:10
Yeah, of course. Thanks, Mark. It's good to see you again.