The Human Element of Building Platform Ecosystems: A Discussion on Resistance, Adoption, and Leadership

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.

Andrew Welch: 0:44
All right. Hey there, everyone. Welcome back to episode four of the Ecosystems podcast with Mark Smith, Chris Huntingford, Anna Demeny and I am Andrew Welch. Will Darrington is not with us today. I actually don't know why, but he has things. The man has things tonight.

Mark Smith: 1:01
He's a busy man. He's a busy man.

Andrew Welch: 1:03
He is a busy guy.

Mark Smith: 1:04
I'm not saying he's getting busy, but he's a busy man.

Andrew Welch: 1:08
We don't take position on what he does.

Chris Huntingford: 1:12
I'm up for that man. I'm definitely up for taking position.

Andrew Welch: 1:17
Today we're going down to level three of the strategic pyramid. We're going to be talking about building the platform ecosystem. For those of you who are just joining us, this is your first episode with us. I really encourage you to go back, check some of the episodes one to three, but we'll quickly recap. Hopefully you can see what I'm sharing. What I want to reintroduce again today is what we call the strategic pyramid In our model, and this is for value and how to value architecture and value work in the cloud generally, the Microsoft Cloud specifically. We've already covered implementing workloads and all that comes along with that, as well as, in our last episode, creating the conditions for success and all of the capabilities there. So worker and platform management, enterprise architecture, et cetera. What we want to talk about today and what we really want to focus our discussion on in this episode, is building the platform ecosystem. For those of you who can't see the visual, you're listening to this on the podcast. When we say building the platform ecosystem, we're now really into the core of what a proper cloud platform or a cloud ecosystem needs to entail. We're talking about, at least up in the early days, building and deploying your landing zone across the cloud, integrating landing zones across different technologies. You may have an Azure Cloud landing zone that you're integrating with your power platform landing zone. You may have LEGO bricks or building blocks for core data platform services or core integration services. So integrating all of that together, building and maintaining and growing your institutional data model, the IDM, which, if you are familiar with Microsoft's common data model in DataVerse and in business applications, an IDM is like a common data model for your organization. So if you're a shipping company, you might have a data model to represent vessels or cargo or whatever your line of business is Core platform or core data platform services. So think data governance, microsoft Perview, think the data. You think fabric services, one lake or your organization's data lake or multiple lakes. So those core data platform services that all the rest rely on enterprise data governance. I mentioned Perview a moment ago. And then, finally, I think this is the biggest piece of ongoing work and it's integrating workloads across your ecosystem, across the estate. So we've moved far away from building the workloads and now we're talking about how to make tens or dozens or hundreds or even thousands of workloads all work together in your cloud ecosystem. So that's our topic today how do we build these cloud ecosystems, building that platform ecosystem, and then in our next episode we'll go a layer down.

Mark Smith: 4:15
This is great, I mean one thing that just popped out to me there under IDM institutional data models I was working for a customer about six years ago and they were in they were a trained company, right so their own railways and they had acquired and this is in Australia, they had acquired I don't know three or four other rail companies across the various states, and it was interesting to see that the IDM, as you call it, was the hardest bit they struggled with, because each of these rail systems, even though they're in the same industry, had such different ways of naming and labeling things and there was this kind of conflict internally around no, we don't call it that, we call it this, we don't call it that. And so part of what we had to do because we were moving them all to a single system, a single data set, a single view of what was going on in the organization was getting them to agree on a common labeling IDM for the organization. And that was a lot of work because, for whatever reason you know the history, the history, the legacy people wanted to protect the way they labeled it because it had some nostalgia, you know, from way back when. So I think that's such an important thing to index on at this level, because having an organization that has a common language for things allows for so much more to be done, because you're taking the risk of misinterpretation out of the mix in designing solutions.

Ana Demeny: 5:51
I also think that once you have a common language, it goes beyond having the same labels for data, even even though that's a very, very important topic. It sort of reconciliates the people who would rather just mandate. You know, we will do things this way because I am the boss, I am the VP of I don't know engineering or I am the VP of commercial, and I say this sort of data is gonna be reflected in this manner and the moment these people who rather wanna wear the boss hat are starting to talk to each other and instead of mandating you know what's gonna happen they actually come to an agreement. It even moves beyond indexing data properly. It even goes into okay. So these people are gonna start talking to each other. They're gonna go for a drink, you know, or for lunch, and they're gonna start talking about technology and their own ideas and ultimately, hopefully, they're gonna establish the technology, because I think that with this particular layer, we are potentially going a little bit into cross cloud. I think we're quite Microsoft, obviously, but at this point in time we are talking about organizational level and many times within an organization, you will find those people who are there for the past 25 years and they have built their stuff into one type of technology and even though you're coming with, you know, microsoft view and an ecosystem architecture, you can't just create something separate from it, because then it won't be an ecosystem, it will just be a bigger silo. So the moment people start agreeing on emotional stuff, exactly like you said Mark then we start talking about real technology and what the best decision is for things.

Chris Huntingford: 8:16
So I wanna throw a spanner in the works. I don't think this is at all about technology. I think it's part of it, but I think that, as the era of enablement takes ahead, I think technology becomes the tool I think we've got to think about. Okay, so, like Mark, based on what you said, the people part here is really important, right? Like we have to be able to say you know, what are the people really expecting and what are the people looking for? And Anna, you made a great point around, like, people are gonna meet up and talk and do the thing, and ultimately that's gonna be around some of the technology. But actually, the way we break it down, as we say, all right, the primary is the people. So they're like the epicenter, and the epicenter is really what we wanna drive from an enablement perspective. The next layer around that, the kind of cores, around the cores, the processes, and you say, okay, well, you know what are the things that, like, these people need to do? What are the layers of process that we need to bake in here? And then the tech is the thing that enables that. Right, so the tech is the thing that just surrounds it. And let me use I'm gonna use co-pilot as an example here, because I think this is really interesting. When you look at the three kind of buckets or brackets of what people are expecting AI to do, the first line or the first kind of bucket is adoption. It's not the tech's there, right, the tech is gonna be there forever but it's actually how do we adopt that and how do we drive an enablement through that technology? Now, I've seen the stuff that Anna and Andrew put together from a kind of defined and refined cloud ecosystem and I use that internally at ANS Like that's one of our de facto things to use, because I think it's a really great reference ecosystem. But it's interesting because when we talk to organizations, they're like, okay, that's cool, how do we get people to do that? And I'm like, yeah, this is where it starts getting really real. So I hope that makes sense, right, because I think it's like it's so much wider.

Andrew Welch: 10:03
I think that that you guys Chris, you and Anna have have hit on a a hidden benefit or maybe not so hidden benefit or hidden side of this, this Work building that platform ecosystem. And we started with the institutional data model. So let's pick up there, right? So when we think about that Institutional data model, or that common data model across an organization, I think that there's really three Core pieces of this. One is the business bit, right? Having that institutional data model allows different parts of the business. Or, if you're in an acquisitive situation where there's a merger, there's an acquisition or multiple, it kind of provides a path to normalizing Data that is about the same thing but is described and is shaped in a different way, right? So there's a huge business benefit to getting everyone speaking the same language. There's also, I think, an obvious data benefit, right, you can more quickly, you can work quickly, integrate systems. We're gonna set that one aside because I, you know, I know we, you think we want to talk about people here. The third is the ability to get enabling technology into the hands of People much more quickly, because we don't have to screw around with having an argument about the data model every single time. So I think that you know a big part of this is, you know, when we talk about building that platform ecosystem. For from the technologists point of view, it is about doing the hard work under the covers of what most users see right to Allow users to take that technology, allow people to use that technology as an enabler without having to think about, oh my god, what's happening under under the covers. Because we've been mature in our approach to the ecosystem and we've done that hard work so that you can just go run with it and do great things.

Ana Demeny: 11:58
Oh, I think we actually we actually did a great job from hiding what's real from what the users are seeing. We call that encapsulating and we pride to use it as a programming method. And Then we bundle up all sorts of data from everywhere with various labels, and then we struggle with data duplication, and I don't even want to put in the mix regulations such as GDPR, like it can all be a big disaster that the user never sees what. What are you? It's just. It's not necessarily a thing all the time for for the user, because it's just. It gets so complex that you don't, you don't even think about it as a user, right?

Andrew Welch: 12:46
But going back to what Chris was saying, and co-pilot not you, normal users I Was just saying to myself is now the time we're going to talk about Steve Moore do's blog? Is now the time we're gonna talk about.

Ana Demeny: 12:58
No, not yet, Not yet, not yet but now yet. It's definitely front of my. Was my my midnight breathing last night, right, I guess? Going back to what Chris was saying with with the whole co-pilot functionality, I guess this layer of the strategic pyramid is cultural. Earthquake is not just a data, is the Various standards with regards to how we integrate things. How does the data flow? What sort of pointers have we got? How are the teams going to work? What sort of governance and security are we gonna establish ecosystem-wide? And I think Chris is solely right without proper adoption from the teams who are working on these things, I don't see how we're ever gonna be able to do it, because you and I and we go there and talk about oh, and we're just gonna move, you know, on structured data, such as your files and folders, your PDFs, and we're gonna do yours. Semi-structured data, such as your Excel spreadsheets. Going back to Steve's blog, right, and everything is gonna live in harmony, but in reality, you will find that organizations will have people there who have been the subject matter expert on whatever piece of functionality that they thought was crucial for the organization and then eventually they get a little desk of their own and their the authority and everyone goes to them and Mock their desk and you don't really learn about anything else, but their desk is a big deal is by the window. You know they have the picture of their wife where everyone else is hot desking. You know the individual. They have created this great thing and Everyone comes to them and asks them questions. So they are important. So they're not motivated to go ahead and look for Newer technology or other ways of doing things, and unless they have a really good leader and I'm not saying manager here who's ready to push them towards a strategic way of thinking and was able to say, yeah, you did great last year. However, these are the things that I think we should work on as a team Then that person's probably gonna Hug. Derek sells spreadsheet from four years on end and when you do come and you're trying to sell you know ecosystem architecture like Chris is gonna try and do? they're gonna be like uh-huh. No, that's not, it's not how we do things and I have to lightly American of you to like want to say we need to do things differently.

Andrew Welch: 15:50
But you first started by saying you're doing great, you need to say something nice, and then you need to use the criticism and then you need to say something nice again. That's the way we do it, the old shit sandwich and so. And why I?

Mark Smith: 16:03
thought of that just then, because I've got two points here. One I've started reading the culture map and of course that's okay. I've got a map and of course that's a classic problem. They give an example of a french person that went to the us, thought she was being a rock star and her manager was giving her shit sandwiches and she just saw all the glowing bits of bread on each side and he thought she was a rock star and she forgot about the shit that he delivered in the middle, because cultural differences, you know, but I digress. One thing that Anna said then was um, you know the person. And in my mind I was like I don't know the person. And then I knew the person. I had the sales rep in in south Australia take me to a meeting to sell, to sell back then dynamics right, and because he had uncovered this large company in insurance and this guy had Sheets connected to spreadsheets, connected to spreadsheets, connected to spreadsheets, like it was the most advanced Spreadsheet ecosystem that I'd ever seen and he brings this guy into the room for us to sell him why dynamics was going to replace all his spreadsheets. And he was like this is awesome, right, this is awesome and we. We never heard from that guy again, right, and nothing happened with that account, because he was like You've just told me how we got unpacked, why I'm the linchpin of this organization With this technology. That might be better, but I will no longer be the linchpin. See you later.

Chris Huntingford: 17:48
People, man, people, people, people. It's the culture thing.

Andrew Welch: 17:51
I think we should all for for the next episode. We should all think of who is the person that we remember from our past, who is best at obstructing modernization, and we should just call them and be like hey, do you want to come on?

Ana Demeny: 18:03
my, on my especially.

Andrew Welch: 18:06
You owe this honor to the fact that you were the biggest pain in the ass I've had to work with. Yeah, thank you.

Ana Demeny: 18:12
I think that's also Much less important than we think. We're much less important than we thought at the time when we were working on the project. Because and I don't know I think we should start talking about steve mordews the website, because it was. It's so relatable, right.

Andrew Welch: 18:31
We've gone from pain in the ass to steve mordew very quickly here.

Mark Smith: 18:34
So One of you need to make sure that you got that podcast. Sorry that that blog up so we can bring it up on screen and people can see where to go to find it.

Ana Demeny: 18:43
So, andrew, maybe if you want to grab that, I guess what I'm trying to say is that those connected excel spreadsheets. They seem Super important and the individual who's actually developed them Believes that he is the man. Nothing's gonna survive, you know, unless he keeps on building on on his excel spreadsheets, um, and continues carrying on with like manual reports it's also for, in reality, you will find that most organizations find a way to work around it. So when we're talking about workloads and deliverables, you will find that little by little, ill, year by year, even though this person believes they're super important and the company will for sure die tomorrow if they leave it they actually fail to recognize the fact that their application becomes less and less important. And when it's time for restructuring or a A new Cultural change, that's the first thing that's going to get dropped. So if you're one of those people who believes that your software product is the absolute best and it's a great idea To just hold all of that IP to yourself, know that you're better off just taking some new certifications and trying to revolutionize these things, because there will come a day when you will become irrelevant, not just for your organization but overall but here's the thing they're five years out from retirement and they just want to hit retirement.

Mark Smith: 20:35
No, I'm serious right. I've had this in two organizations, where the person doesn't want to change anything. They're five years from retirement. They don't want to learn something new. When I've been there, I've introduced new technology and they're just like not interested. They don't want to learn it. They just don't rock the boat. We're almost at the end of my tenure. I don't want to make a name for myself. I'm done, I'm I'm. I'm about to get my pension. I'm on my way.

Chris Huntingford: 21:00
It's a problem.

Mark Smith: 21:01
But they've been in the organization so long and nobody wants to challenge him. Nobody, everyone's afraid of challenging them because If you're like, you know the IT guy, he knows your browser history, he knows where you've been, and there's this kind of fear of IT and what they know and what they see and what they have on you.

Chris Huntingford: 21:22
I'm seeing it more and more man Like. So I do a lot of work in local government, central government, stuff like that, and and what I'm starting to notice is that I can speak for the uk right, there is actually a shift happening. I mean, I'm chatting to people that are Typical, like in a career, but also actually really interested in in doing different things. The one guy was chatting to is like let's disrupt the council, blah, blah, blah I can't mention names and stuff and I loved it. It was brilliant. It was on a call with me today and I'm like, dude, this is amazing. And he started showing me what he had planned and I just I was blown away by the attitude, right, and what I thought, what I started thinking, is that maybe you know the young folks coming into the workplace. I say that like I'm a, like I'm an old bat, but Maybe, maybe the grass coming into the workplace and maybe maybe the kind of push towards like re digitization and all that type of stuff is quite good, but I think there has to be a change. I actually agree with Anna. I think they, I think change will be forced. This is like a fee-loaded thing fit it or fuck off and you may be five years away from your tenure, but you, that's fine. You can hold on to it as much as you want, man, but it's gonna go.

Mark Smith: 22:29
But that's where you need strong leadership, right, you need strong leadership coming in, and so, like we're off seeing big transformation, particularly in federal government scenarios, is where a young cto or cio have come into role. That's it. They're about to make a name for themselves, right, they're, they are. They don't have history. They're coming in. They don't care about legacy, they care about hey, I'm gonna create the new future. I just find it doesn't work with older chaps.

Andrew Welch: 22:56
Yeah, typical, I know what you mean, yeah as you guys say that and and I totally buy it because you know we've all, we've all seen it, but I do, I do want to just offer, um, just want to offer a story from from long, long ago. There was a when I was in in high school I had a Teacher. He taught me for geometry and for trigonometry. He had also taught my stepfather in the same classroom in the same subject. That's how long this guy had been here and Andrew stepfather is not young.

Ana Demeny: 23:31
Just just putting it down here, he is considerably not young.

Andrew Welch: 23:37
Not my dad, not my dad, and and.

Ana Demeny: 23:40
Not, your dad never watched his podcast.

Andrew Welch: 23:42
My dad watches this podcast all the time. I mean, he, he, I think, was our first fan, but anyway, so this, this teacher at the time, my mother this was very, very early on in, you know, people were just playing, playing around with, oh, we could have an educational webpage, right, I had been through, uh, his class and, and I think I may have graduated by this time, but I remember my mother telling me this story that she was Um doing this workshop with some of the teachers in the school on how you can use this particular, now long defunct product. And this guy had offered or this guy had already resigned, he was retiring in like six months and he came into this class on a saturday morning and my mother Looked at him and was like, what the hell are you doing here? And his response and he had a great sort of Country accent and his response was well, kate, I thought that it is never too late to learn something new. And here's this guy who had been teaching the same subject in the same classroom for four decades and had turned up how to use how to use the, the computer machine, in his teaching for the last six months of his career. So I offered that.

Mark Smith: 24:53
Just you don't have to be a dinosaur he's an outlier, and often I find these, these older people on tiktok that they are young in personality and everything because of their constant learning attitude. Right, they've decided to learn it all. They've decided that they're gonna keep their brain active. My uncle is a math teacher and you know, he's in his late 80s yet he keeps learning because he goes, if my brain is not learning something new, I'm afraid it's gonna start shutting down and so it's kind of that attitude. Right, we definitely not everybody's the. You know, let's write it to retirement and then I'm gonna go out and, just, you know, smell the roses and things. There are those people and I hope that for me it's a goal for me is that I'll never stop learning. I will always be learning what is new, what is on the cutting edge, what, what am I missing? What's the opportunity? The older I get, I just feel like there's so much more to learn, there's so much more to consume and know it's also a feat of responsibility as well, right?

Ana Demeny: 25:55
so when you are that subject matter expert and you are you have created something truly brilliant like these tools, aren't? I don't want to take anything away from them. They're probably genius, right? Even your guy with like tons of excel spreadsheets connected to each other, I could never do. That is like it's. It's true, genius, right. But the moment you do have strong leadership and you have this vision that other people are gonna learn about that project, is that I'm just letting you be you know to roll with it. Then you, as the owner and the father of the you know of the of the thing, all of the sudden you feel a responsibility to teach others, hopefully, and then when you teach, you need to say things out loud, and then you know, eventually you need to listen to some of the feedback that gets passed back to you, and that's the type of learning as well. So I think we are, with today's episode, we are talking to leadership a lot here, right, we're not here to, you know, cast any sort of ill will to whoever created an innovative product of whatever database they thought was useful, and the time we're here to say you, you know, you know you have a leader person. Have a good look at what you've got within your state and make sure that you share that knowledge in order to be able to adopt these new ways of doing business right and I said, though, about.

Andrew Welch: 28:42
You know, in this episode we're doing a lot of talking to leadership. Actually, we're probably doing a lot of talking to and with leadership in all of these episodes, but it's one thing for us and people have been doing this since time immemorial, right, and I'm explaining about how, how the old folks don't want to learn anything new, and, you know, one day Chris is celebrating a very important birthday next month, so you know he's going to be there sooner than later, right, but in any case, I think that there's a huge leadership imperative here, and I will share some statistics, and these came, and I actually will share my screen as well, for those who are watching are watching on YouTube, so I use this slide in a presentation that I gave. Chris was there as well at the UK emergency services technology show last week, and these all come from the newspaper, the news magazine, the Economist, from the 16th of June of this year. So there were three, three statistics across three countries that were that were listed. The first is that in the United Kingdom, there was an 11% average worker productivity rise in the most productive firms versus the least productive firms. The least productive firms saw no rise in productivity from 2010 to 2019. So if you're at the top, you experience this 11% rise and if you're at the bottom, you experience nothing. Furthermore, in Canada, productivity growth tripled in the most, in the most productive versus the least productive firms from 2000 to 2015. And then finally and this was a little bit tough, so for those who can't see the graphic, I'll try to explain this firms that were in the 75th percentile of investment in, we'll say, innovation, investment in modernization. They enjoyed a return on investment capital that was 20 points higher than the median, and that gap had doubled since 2000. Right when I think about and I go back to the fable of the boiled frog, right where you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, they're going to recognize the frog, will recognize that the water is boiling and we'll jump out. But if you put the frog in the water and then you gradually turn up the temperature, the frog doesn't realize what's happening until it is too late. I think this is why this is a leadership conversation, because we're to a point where modernizing is not optional, because the firms that are investing in modernizing are pulling out way ahead of the firms that don't, and this is across the global economy.

Chris Huntingford: 31:26
I remember watching this and I loved it. I thought it was absolutely phenomenal and I will tell you this is about the way people behave. As well have I ever shown you the trough of disillusionment slide with regards to upskilling consultants from a technology perspective?

Andrew Welch: 31:39
Have you ever not shown us the trough of disillusionment? Do you have it?

Chris Huntingford: 31:43
I don't think I've got it. I'll see if I can dig it up, but basically, yeah, it's terrible and I got shouted at at a user group for showing this, so you know what is it a scene. No, it's just, I think, relatively accurate.

Mark Smith: 32:00
Just while you're pulling that up, chris Anna, andrew, can you look at, you know, this layer that we're looking at on your strategic pyramid? I felt like we we kicked off with the institutional data model but we haven't really covered landing zones. We haven't covered core platform service and data governance. I think we we haven't necessarily covered integrated workloads across the estate and I just think we should, perhaps before we wrap today as in we're up in your time, but we do index on those areas as well.

Andrew Welch: 32:37
I was hoping we come back to that. I put it back on the screen for those watching. Anna, you want to? You want to grab one and roll with your favorite?

Mark Smith: 32:44
Are you ready, chris? Just before we do that, chris, do you have your one? Okay, sure, we just look at Chris's and then we'll come back to that.

Chris Huntingford: 32:50
It goes beautifully with with the tech, right. So I'm gonna I'm probably gonna build this thing for you. So this is I'm gonna use platform as the example here, because I think it's a good one. And you know, with regards to the company's not embracing technology, people are people be the same, right, and what is ultimately happening is that you got a bunch of people, whether they sit as a devs or not, as your relevance. What will happen is that they'll go through this area of growth where they start learning stuff. They're like okay, we're going through this pain with AI, we're going through this pain with learning, and we don't necessarily understand it. But hey, you know what? This is hard stuff. What happens is everyone gets to the top of the hill and they're like cool, we're experienced makers. This is absolutely awesome. We built something cool and that could be companies, companies going holy shit, we've come out on top, we've implemented low-code workloads, we've implemented Azure workloads, we've built an ecosystem. This is absolutely awesome. And then they upgrade again to whatever. That is Like superheroes or Cloud Ninjas I don't know. Cloud Ninjas sounds cool. Ultimately, what happens now is that, with the technology coming out, like tools like Co-Pilot and AI, you are able to now fast-track across that growth gap because of the fact that tech is actually a lot stronger. But what's happening is that there are a lot of people living in this well or trofford disillusionments companies and people who are like, oh, that's a revel in the world of finance and operations and X++, and never shall we ever grow. And eventually, when X++ dies fine, you know, cool. What are they going to do Eventually, when Dynamics 365, most of the config can be done with Co-Pilot? What are they going to do when companies don't implement AI and they're still living in this well of disillusionments? There will be companies fast-tracking way above them and wave faster Right, and it's actually a vicious cycle. So what you will see is that there will be money, there will be more money, and a lot of consultants do this. They're like, okay, and companies do this as well. They're like, holy shit, we're going to stay there and then move because that company is offering us all the money, but then, fuck, that's great, but we can't move because we're in this place of like blockery or digital disillusionments, right, but unfortunately, all these companies that are coming up now like Startups or the Lewis Bay Bucks of the world, they're like driving past in Ferraris, flinging the bird at everyone, going well done, cool for you, man. You stay there. I'll just get there real quick and make loads of cash. And that's what organizations are happening. And actually, one last thing is that that is a snake that eats its own tail, and it's terrible because the companies that think things like AI is a fad or like, yeah, like AI is a fad, or tech is a fad, or low code is a fad, you're all stuck there. And I'll tell you what, if any of you are listening to this, you better sort your shit out quickly from a data and security perspective now and I'm talking to people as well and you better start picking up a book and learning, because if you don't, you are going to be stuck there and, unfortunately, you're going to be living in the trough of disillusionments and eventually make yourself redundant. And I'm talking to organizations and people, so I'm done.

Andrew Welch: 35:48
If you could not see Chris's slide, you've missed something. You've missed something.

Ana Demeny: 35:53
You're terrible. That's the beauty of it is how terrible that slide is. My problem is that everyone's hens are like happy, and I don't understand why everyone's happy.

Chris Huntingford: 36:05
Like I don't know. I built that three minutes before a user presentation because somebody was arguing for me about the fact that I said functional consultants can be maybe relevant.

Ana Demeny: 36:20
Oh, that's a very, very good point, but it depends, chris, it depends on how you actually define functional consultant.

Chris Huntingford: 36:28
Oh, I have a whole presentation of this. Would you like to see it? I do know that the same quality slides.

Andrew Welch: 36:33
We've come to know and love.

Chris Huntingford: 36:34
They absolutely are. They're incredible top quality. They're even names against them. This is one thing that I love again. Henry Ford said this, and he said if you keep doing what you always did, you'll keep getting what you always got. And the thing is that actually, that's not true right now, because if you keep doing what you always did, you will get much less of what you always got, because you will have market share taken from you by people that know shit more than you do, and I said this on a podcast today. I was like okay, is AI going to take my job? I'm like no, the people that know AI are going to take your job.

Ana Demeny: 37:09
Yeah, exactly, and I love what you said because there's another and I'm actually just reading something very similar to what you've just said. Now they are actually referring to the phrase with great power comes great responsibility. Now, unfortunately, the author of my book is convinced that the line comes from the movie Spider-Man.

Andrew Welch: 37:41
Why, would I Please, we need to tag that author when we post this on?

Mark Smith: 37:49
that that is golden.

Ana Demeny: 37:51
Right, he's an American as well, so you know, he's not happening in. America. It doesn't matter. But he is right with great power does come great responsibility. So you're right, if you're chilling in your functional consultant pond and right now you still have a lot of return of investment, that's great. But, like you, shouldn't, you shouldn't, you shouldn't ignore the fact that you do have great responsibility to keep that going. And with that I'd like to go back to your pyramid, andrew, because apart from the institutional data model, we are talking about standards overall, right. So we're not just saying that the data model should be consistent throughout your organization. We also say, for example, that you should have enterprise data governance. So it's really great if you're working on a dynamics project, for example. We do have governance. There we're pretty chilled because we have, like, security roles and all of that, upgrades to the Microsoft 365 system and then eventually to Azure, and we're happy that we have data governance. We are talking about enterprise data governance, so we are introducing products and systems that are looking at our overall strategy and our overall data flow and data quality and data sensitivity across our state, not just within Power Platform or not just within even our Excel spreadsheets, etc. Etc. What we're saying here is that when we're looking at building a platform ecosystem, you should have a coherent strategy on how you're going to do data governance overall and you can't just call yourself successful because your Power Platform has field level security Like it's just not going to work that way. If, in the end, you're using integration with just one admin account and then all of their data ends in a SQL database that everyone's an admin to, then you don't have data governance at all.

Chris Huntingford: 40:41
Is that not okay, is that?

Ana Demeny: 40:45
I hear it isn't. It's just what my friends tell me.

Chris Huntingford: 40:51
You shouldn't make the service accounts to do everything. Oh shit, if I'd known that. Oh man, everything's ruined.

Andrew Welch: 40:59
I just had this flashback and the flashback concerns Keith Waddling. I'm sure that some of our listeners or folks who everyone knows, Keith right.

Mark Smith: 41:11
Was he clothed in the flashback?

Chris Huntingford: 41:13
No, because he wasn't wearing clothes Was he speaking to you from his butt.

Andrew Welch: 41:18
Keith does a fine outfit, so he usually is clothed. But listen, keith calls me. This was a few years ago and he says you're never going to believe this. He proceeds to tell me this story about an organization he was working with that shall go unnamed where they had a dev environment, a test environment and a production environment. What they were doing is they were writing code and making customizations in their dev environment. If they thought that they worked in dev, they then went into their test environment and wrote the same code and made the same customizations and tests. Then they tested it and they thought well, it works there too. Then they went into prod and they did the same thing.

Mark Smith: 42:00
It's just manual ALM, yeah, manual ALM.

Chris Huntingford: 42:04
Student driven CICD.

Andrew Welch: 42:10
Hey man you want some hamsters? He could not contain himself. He was dying. He just he could not with us.

Chris Huntingford: 42:18
That's how to put the robot back in the human man. It's really important that you get as many people as you can to rewrite everything over and over again. That's so genius. But I can understand why they're just putting people in jobs man.

Andrew Welch: 42:3
They were well-practiced. I mean they had a lot of practice making that customization. They did it three times.

Mark Smith: 42:37
Andrew, tell us about landing zones in this context.

Andrew Welch: 42:41
This is one. I spend a strange amount of my time a strangely large amount of my time, thinking about landing zones. This is a concept. First of all, let's talk about what a landing zone is. At its core it is. A landing zone is a collection of technical services that you have deployed and configured such that you are now able to land workloads into the tenant, into the environment, into the virtual machine, into whatever it is that you're landing these workloads in. You can debate some of the finer points of this. A pure landing zone is ideally written. You may have heard the phrase infrastructure as code. You can deploy the thing as code and it materializes. There's a different take on this in Azure land versus Power Platform, land versus Fabric land, et cetera but that's what a landing zone is. This is for anyone who is in the business of building cloud infrastructure, whether that is your Azure tenant and the subscription and the connections and the express routes and et cetera there, or whether it's building your Power Platform environmental architecture, whether it's building your primary data lake, whatever it is. People who are in that world know what a landing zone is. What I find is that people who are more in the implementing workloads or that has been their career up until now. They don't think in terms of building a landing zone. They think in terms of I have this app, I need a place to put it, let me build a place to put the app. The best way to think of the difference is that a landing zone is like the foundation for your house. You would not put up walls of the upper floors of your house until you would build a good foundation, whereas if you come at it from a workload mindset, you're like I have a thing, I need to put it in the room, let's build the room. No foundation, no water, no electricity, no, nothing. That's what a landing zone is. I think that the benefit to an organization deploying the landing zone for their particular technology up front yes, it raises some of the upfront capital investment, right, but it's so much better in the long run because you're able to deploy the individual workload so much faster, so much more cheaply. The other bit of this is the platform landing zone integration, and this is I kind of alluded to it a bit ago where you've got your Azure infrastructure folks who are going to deploy their Azure Cloud landing zone and you've got your Power Platform folks who are going to deploy their Power Platform landing zone and you might have data platform guys who come in over top of Azure infrastructure and deploy their data platform-specific components. But it's a non-trivial effort right to have kind of the overall purview or, to continue with the analogy to be the air traffic control that makes sure that each of these different landing zones, each of these different bricks or runways will say, kind of fit together in a way where you can quickly land workloads that span the data platform, the application platform, azure infrastructure, etc. So I just can't say how important this concept is to starting off with your cloud ecosystem or, if you feel like you've screwed it up, to getting that cloud ecosystem back on track. It's like planting the seed in the ground. You can't not do it.

Chris Huntingford: 46:21
It's like a digital map man.

Ana Demeny: 46:23
Then you can look at the other things that you've got in the estate. We've got their core data services. Now, once you start working on a project, on a platform ecosystem, once you win a deal to go in and do stuff, it's important to understand that it's very likely that the stuff that you're going to do or improve or create is not actually the core system that these people are using right. So, even integrating these core data platform services with the rest of the state using the same principles, using making sure that you have landing zones already, making sure that everything integrates in the same way we call it neighborhoods, because we like to standardize the way you're going to use technology to integrate your data across the state, using the enterprise data governance principle. So you need to recognize this core data platform services and the core service is what the organization actually does. So maybe you're there to improve on, let's just say, the example of the HR system, but they are there to sell planes. That's their business, those are their core business models. But that does not mean that you don't have to make sure that your HR system doesn't integrate with the whole thing so that people are trained and onboarded and interviewed and so on and so forth, and it doesn't mean that your landing zone shouldn't be solid or that you shouldn't look at the institutional data model, even though you don't have necessarily access to or your workloads are not tapping into all of the systems throughout the state. But having a standard, or at least knowing about it, is important If you are to do something relevant. That's not going to be again just a silo somewhere that other people have to need into the entire system and that exposes you to gaps and vulnerabilities and so on and so forth.

Mark Smith: 49:08
There's a burning question that I have had for the last 10 minutes around this level building the platform ecosystem and that is the how and why. I say the how and what you've published. There's a lot of this is what it needs to be, but there's what I feel is missing is the how. If you take people that have been great at implementing workloads, they're being great at creating conditions for success and, as we've discussed before, those two levels of the pyramid within five years, are probably going to have AI do a lot of them right. So, in other words, we become irrelevant. Oh, those two levels. So, therefore, if I'm thinking, ok, I need to get ahead of this game and my role in the career position I'm in, how do I build the skills to be able to consult solidly around building the platform ecosystem? And so, therefore, where are the resources that I go out and look at? You know what is landing zone deployment? What is platform landing zone integration? How do I get really good at that? How do I make an authority on that? How to become an authority on institutional data models and being able to go into an organization and create one? What are the steps that I need to do? What's the consulting skills I need to acquire when I look at core data platform services. What should I be searching for? What should I be constructing? What should I be building out for an organization if I'm called in to do that? How do I get the data governance integrated workloads across the estate? How do I make sure that I am rock solid across these parts? What are the skills I need to learn? Do I need to go get a TOGAP certification? What do I need to do? What do I need to do to really become the guru of the authority at this layer, being that I'm already coming from, perhaps a guru and authority on the implementation workloads and creating conditions for success? What's your advice for those people that go? You know what. I see the puck moving, I see where things are going and I need to get ahead of that game. Where can I find the learning? Where can I find the training to go deep into that area?

Andrew Welch: 51:19
Why is it always a puck that's moving?

Mark Smith: 51:22
Because it comes from a story and I forget the famous American that said it.

Andrew Welch: 51:30
I think it was. Oh, the Canadians are upset. I think it was a famous Canadian who said it.

Mark Smith: 51:34
It's got to do with ice hockey. Right, it's ice hockey, isn't it? Is that what it's got to do with ice hockey? And it's got to do with? Don't skate to where the puck is now. Go to where it's going to be next.

Andrew Welch: 51:46
I think it's a way in Gretzky quote. I could be wrong, though.

Mark Smith: 51:50
Yeah, gretzky is definitely a, because that's the word that was in my mind. Is he Canadian?

Andrew Welch: 51:55
Pretty sure he's Canadian. Please, I mean someone, I'm not a hockey fan.

Mark Smith: 52:00
I'm looking it up.

Ana Demeny: 52:01
I mean I don't know, but what I do know is that I always want to be in Andrews. I always want to be in Andrews team in a pub quiz, right, he knows so much trivia.

Mark Smith: 52:13
Here's the actual quote when you win, say nothing. When you lose, say less. Oh, I didn't know that. That's actually the precursor to the quote. I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. So he's actually got about three quotes in that one quote.

Andrew Welch: 52:28
Where is he from? Where was he? Yeah, he's still around. Where is he from?

Mark Smith: 52:33
Yeah, I'm just typing when was he born.

Andrew Welch: 52:36
Canadian. Yeah, is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player. There you go.

Mark Smith: 52:41
Brandford, brandford, canada. He's 62 years of age. He was born in 1961, on the 26th of January. There we go. Sorry, wayne, for calling you American. It's just as bad as somebody calling a Kiwi an Australian.

Chris Huntingford: 52:56
Right, but they're literally the same thing. Mark Wait, did you know what I get? I get confused for every possible race kind of culture you could possibly think of, man Like, well, Southern Hemisphere. At least I was told that the other day I was a Kiwi, then an Aussie. I've been asked if I was from Argentina. I have a lot of questions.

Mark Smith: 53:20
I tell you what Argentina I reckon is the untapped area of IT future People in Argentina. I don't know if it's completely untapped though I think in my observation, and I look at the stats of my podcast over the last six years and I'm lowest represented in viewers in South America and Africa, and I'm talking about the continents here.

Andrew Welch: 53:50
Thank you for taking with him.

Mark Smith: 53:51
Yeah, yeah, yeah, honestly okay, but it's changing. Right, but it's just. My observation is that I don't see audiences in those two regions yet. I see massive audiences across Europe, America and South Asia and those type of areas, but not those two continents.

Ana Demeny: 54:11
When we went to Argentina earlier this year, we actually saw an immense amount of digital nomads in Argentina, so I do think things are moving and it's going to be. It's actually a shock to me that you're saying that Mike is untapped. I was expecting it to be quite flourishing over there in Argentina already, based on the people that we've managed walking the streets or having a coffee, you know, and the speed of their internet as well.

Mark Smith: 54:54
I'm often putting jobs up for people for my personal work on Upwork and I look at where are the countries that are most represented right, and of course, I see India while we're represented. I see Pakistan while we're represented. I see Ukraine well represented in those. You know, those gig workers, if you like. I don't see anything very little from South America. I'm seeing more come out of Africa, from all the different countries in Africa, but, as I say, south America, I'm not seeing those people on those platforms picking up gigs, having very specialist skills. That's my observation.

Andrew Welch: 55:39
My sense about Argentina and, like Anna said, we spent Anna and I spent and Alexandra spent 35 days in South America, across Argentina, uruguay and Chile earlier this year, and you know I have different thoughts on each of those places. But since we've been talking about Argentina, what an incredible place it is. It's beautiful, it is clean, it is modern, it's filled with educated people. I think that you know, if you read the history of Argentina over the last 50, 60 years, it has had some very difficult economic times, which probably contributes to maybe that underrepresentation, but that is, in my view, in no way attributable to you know. It's just a very educated, very modern society. From everything that I can tell, we loved it there. We would move there if it wasn't so far away.

Mark Smith: 56:38
Why are you avoiding my question?

Andrew Welch: 56:40
Oh no, no, we just went down a rat hole.

Mark Smith: 56:42
No, no, I know, I know, I know, I know, but let's come back to building the platform ecosystem. How do I get skilled up in these areas? And what I'm really, I suppose, asking, and Anna, is that you go back to Cloud Lighthouse. By the way, if you haven't seen it, folks that went live last week, you can find it as a company listing on LinkedIn, and then you can also go to cloudlighthouseh sorry, cloudlighthouse and check out the webpage that we now have set up for the show. But I think, guys, it would be awesome to add further learning resources for folks like and just bash them all in there. All those. Yeah, there you go, get it up on screen Now. Let's smash those all in there and give people some learning part, some opportunity to find out. Chris, honestly, bro, why do I look so sad in that picture? Send me another photo and I'll get it stopped out.

Ana Demeny: 57:42
In fact, any of you if you don't like those lips. So from my perspective, my answer would be twofold here. Once again, this is a leadership thing, because the effort to learn some of these things and skill is going to be considerable and you may not be able to learn it by yourself. So if your leadership wakes up and realizes where they are in Chris's slide, you know they're going to start hiring some experts. Now these experts, for example, in learning zones, yeah, they will have to be friendly and like normal people yeah who want to share some of the knowledge and start working together with other people. So, in my opinion, the very first step is to have leadership adoption and leadership authority here and the willingness to invest a little bit in this skill, because I think we must stop with, oh, barclay, from so simple, dynamic, so simple. Now, everything requires investment, so we need investment. That's how we do it. That's how we start building ecosystem architecture. Yeah, number one. Then, if you really want to learn about it, pick a subject. I guarantee that Microsoft has a learning path for it. There's a learning path on governance, on how to do you know a Microsoft runs on trust system overall. Don't get scared about the fact that it's mostly you know about Azure, because we are talking here about ecosystem architecture, so it's not just Power Platform. Yeah, learn a bit about Azure as well. There are multiple learning paths about, if you will, an institutional data model and how data should be modeled across this state. There's a lot of learning now already about fabric. There's a huge amount of learning about industry clouds, for example, and those contain all of the above.

Mark Smith: 1:00:19
So here's the thing, anna when I'm talking with people that are not Microsoft, right, they look at something like Microsoft Learn and go. You know what? I don't even know where to start. It's like a mega university. There's courses on everything. We're talking about enablement in this particular area, in context of the period pyramid. I think there is a need for us to provide, not necessarily a learning path, but hey, start here, like, if I go, I want to learn about fabric. Oh my gosh, where the hell do I start? It's fragmented, it's all over the place. I don't want to be like two weeks down a learning path and go. I'm actually not like it's taking me down a data science path or something like that. I need to step one learn the shit. Step two learn the shit that's going to build on it. Hey, how do I develop my leadership skills? Because I'm not going from a, I'm in a leadership position. I need to authorize this in my organization. I'm going from a, I'm currently a consultant and I want to move up to that next level. How do I as a person so let's forget about the organization making it move? How do I, as a person, move to that next level? What are the skills I need to develop, what are the skills I need to acquire to become an authority at that level? And that's where I think that there's an opportunity, maybe even a course that you guys could write and make available that people could, you know, purchase or something like that that would give people this kind of learning path. So the problem is, when you follow your nose type learning, you don't know what you missed. You know, and I'm always concerned about I learn on the job. What do you do? The thing is is, if this is all knowledge, you learned that much of it and you didn't realize you missed all this and you think you're an authority. You're authority on a pinhead right. There's the whole world out there that you're not an authority on. But because you're tied up in this little area, you think you are, and I think that's why guided learning and people that have spent the time going what do you really need to know to be a guru in this space, where I'll pull those bricks together and show what this building looks like? That's what people are missing in the world that we're in, where there's so much information everywhere, I don't know where to start.

Andrew Welch: 1:02:33
My take on this is sort of the cheeky answer, but true is that, yes, mark, we're working on a course on this in all of our vast free time, right? So Cloud Lighthouse you're going to find you will find in the medium term future say over the next quarter or so some actual courses on Cloud Lighthouse or Cloud Lighthouse. So that's there. I think that I can also share some advice, right? One piece of advice is to think about what you already know and look under the covers of that thing. So, for example, say that you are a Dynamics, a FinOps consultant, right? Or you're a FinOps administrator in an organization and you feel like you know FinOps and you know about dual write. You know that FinOps is dual writing to Dataverse. So you feel like you know what Dataverse is. But maybe that's the next hop. Go try to learn as much as you can about the things that are either under the covers of what you already know or adjacent to what you already know. So go learn what's happening behind the scenes inside of this Dataverse thing that you're dual writing to, and then start to follow the trail. Oh, so I know about Dataverse, now I'm going to learn about Synapse. Or I'm going to learn about the one lake capability and the short cutting from Dataverse, short cutting of data from Dataverse to one lake. So start with what you know and then start to follow the trail. I also think that there is and we could do around the room here of what is it that if you were going to recommend? So we're going to do this. I want to know from each of you and I'll share my own what are one or two technologies that you think are so are really valuable to learn if you want to make this jump into building platform ecosystems. Where is the Microsoft investment going? What are the linchpin technologies in your view? And I'm going to go to Chris first what do you recommend?

Chris Huntingford: 1:04:38
people get smart on Perfect one lake, co-pilot, all right, and why so? I think that one lake is going to be the data consolidation engine that allows us to bring all the different kind of fragmented bits together. I think that fabric is going to be the mechanism to kind of call and talk to that data and I think that co-pilot is going to be the mechanism to build on that data. That's simple. I think that low code is a product, or I know that we say co-pilot is a product of low code. I think it's going to be the other way around at a later point. I think dynamics will be the other way around at a later point. I think it'll be subsequent. When you're looking at, like building something and you're prompting, the byproduct will be dynamics, the byproduct will be low code, the byproduct will be power BI, but I think data a mechanism to consolidate and call and a mechanism to actually do the thing. That's how I see the pyramid working and I've thought that the day that you two did that presentation at the user group and you had the kind of one lake icon, I looked at it and I'm like this makes absolute sense to me. That's what I think.

Ana Demeny: 1:05:43
Oh, I think it's purview. I'd look at purview because I think that trust is the number one thing that organizations need in order to enable anything else. So one technology that can have a watchful eye over all of your data and processes and who's touching what. That's crucial, so I would recommend that people look into that.

Andrew Welch: 1:06:10
Okay, and Mark, what about you?

Mark Smith: 1:06:12
So I'll pivot away from any tech. You need to master the art of storytelling and telling good stories, and you need to master adoption and change management, because you're going to be taking people on a journey and people understand stories they don't understand. Data they don't understand, or data points is more to what I'm trying to say here. So, if you're saying that this is very much a leadership role, you need to develop the soft skills of leadership, storytelling, adoption and change. How do you take people on a journey with you? They have them wanting to go on the journey, not if you're like you shall go on the journey because I'm going to whip you until you get there. So, from a leadership perspective, I think you need to have the storytelling and the adoption, change management nailed. And if you're looking at adoption, change management doco past pro site it's the best thing out there If you want to, if you really want to a formalized way of being educated in this space, and then the number of resources around storytelling are immense. But I highly recommend those two areas to develop your leadership skills.

Andrew Welch: 1:07:28
Yeah, I totally, and I quickly pulled this up. I'm going to share for those watching the watching the video. This is from a presentation that Anna and I gave at Nordic Summit in Copenhagen this past week. This is why Anna said the watchful eye, because, all right, here's storytelling for you, Some slide animations. The watchful eye of purview rising above your master data node. Anyway, that's all Okay for me. I'm going to go back to technology. Mark cheated here, but I will allow it because it was really important that he said. I kind of thought it was about tech, but yeah, yeah, yeah, the technology that I will call out is Azure Cognitive Search. I think that cognitive search has been something that for some time now, that people didn't pay enough attention to, because they heard search and they sort of thought, yeah, you know that's. Yeah, we've been there, we've done that. But cognitive search is used to index the data estate. As long as your data has been consolidated into a data service that is addressable and accessible by cognitive search. It indexes that data previously just to return search results across an enterprise data estate, but it is now effectively the front door to an AI model built in the Microsoft cloud. That's what cognitive search is doing the indexing of the data that the AI model needs in order to function and to learn. So go learn cognitive search yourself. So, just to recap, we have Chris, we have one Lake fabric and co pilot, anna talked about purview. I mentioned Azure cognitive search and then Mark talked about storytelling and change management and adoption. So just there, filter throughout the noise and start with some of those recommendations there. Start with things that are under or next to the things that you already know the technology or the skills that you already have. That will help you be more comfortable with it and follow the breadcrumbs and tune in sometime in the next quarter or so for training coming to cloud lighthouse.

Mark Smith: 1:09:51
I love it. I love it. Alrighty, let's switch gears. I take it, we can switch gears, folks.

Andrew Welch: 1:09:57
I think we, I think we're good.

Mark Smith: 1:09:59
Okay, what? What are you learning at the moment?

Ana Demeny: 1:10:02
Interesting. Interestingly enough, I'm learning about storytelling, and maybe less about storytelling and more about story listening, or or or leadership in in general, you know, through through books and through studying people, just people around me, whenever we do a presentation, sometimes we've got opinions that are quite divergent from from our own, and oftentimes I am pulled one side and, you know, made aware that the reality is different to what we're trying to evangelize here, to advocate here from a product perspective, and it it leaves me thinking how are these people in positions of authority? How do they manage to convince organizations to give them a pile of money to waste away? So that's what I'm trying to learn, you know, these weeks. How do these people do it? Because you know I want to do it as well. It's just, it's crazy, in my opinion. It's just crazy. Yeah, that's the biggest thing that I'm interested in right now.

Mark Smith: 1:11:28
I like it. I think listening you really you touched on something there for me, because I see so many sellers in our ecosystem and I'm talking about inside, Microsoft, as well as outside as an in the partner part of the ecosystem and they rock up with the slide deck I'm gonna present to the customer right. And this is the first meeting. It's the first fucking meeting and you're already got a presentation for them. How the hell are you at presentation time? You haven't heard, you haven't listened to them, you haven't asked any questions. But let's tell you about what we get, what we can do, what we are, what we you know, and I'm look at all our awards and I'm just like, how about we have no presentation period and we ask questions and learn and Listen. And it blows me away about how often in our I feel in my sector industry and stuff we just don't listen enough. We always got the answers and we don't listen, we don't ask questions.

Andrew Welch: 1:12:37
By that standard, anna should be pretty much rule the world. I can pretty much assure you she is a better listener than any of the other three of us on this.

Mark Smith: 1:12:50
You know what I've taught chat upt to listen Rather than jumping to an answer. So if you're in gtp4, you have this function to now in your settings to basically outline who you are, how you want it to respond, blah, blah, blah. And one of the key things I have in there is, when I give you a prompt, before you answer, ask me any questions for clarification until you're absolutely certain what you want me to say. Now it always prompts me, and then I'll get two or three prompts oh, but are you meaning for this? Or? And then, when it gives the answer, I'm like yes, on point, because it hasn't just jumped to. I'm gonna, you know, put my next word in front of the next and come up with what I think you're asking. It actually Asked me clarifying questions to my prompt before it gives me an answer. And I tell you the quality has gone through the roof.

Ana Demeny: 1:13:46
That's fabulous. I didn't know that it can do that and I use it Expensively, like I use it for everything. I reply to no emails, especially cuz we we deal a lot with solicitors and stuff. Yeah, yeah and like what's the point?

Mark Smith: 1:14:02
Yeah, exactly, exactly, man, I found. I found it in the legal space. It is pretty phenomenal. As I say, I did it on my will and I said what did my lawyers miss? And it came up with four against New Zealand law for specific sections. The lawyer didn't even put in there, didn't even cover, and I'm like why am I paying my lawyer?

Ana Demeny: 1:14:22
You know, I really wish we had this technology before we we bought a really expensive house, because now we're dealing with all sorts of when the UK house buying is just a shit show in the UK the UK real estate market and process is the most dysfunctional Institution I have ever worked with, anywhere, ever.

Mark Smith: 1:14:47
I don't know how anybody trans acts. At the end of the day.

Chris Huntingford: 1:14:50
Man, I don't get it. We just bought a place. It is the most diabolical thing I've ever experienced in my life.

Mark Smith: 1:14:56
Andrew, what are you learning?

Andrew Welch: 1:14:58
This one is easy. I learned I learned two things in the last couple of weeks. The first thing that I learned is that it is very difficult to operate a laptop while you are wearing an inflatable unicorn costume.

Chris Huntingford: 1:15:13
That's way out there, man. I promise you, yeah, I'm with you.

Andrew Welch: 1:15:18
So shout to Chris's Co-presenter at Nordic Summit, rebecca Albers. She found out you cannot operate a laptop while wearing an inflatable unicorn costume. Yeah, and far more importantly, I learned that the city of Malaga, spain, is a fabulous place to have a wedding.

Mark Smith: 1:15:39
But isn't Spain as a whole just a fabulous place?

Andrew Welch: 1:15:43
Very yeah, yeah, spain is.

Mark Smith: 1:15:45
Spain is a fabulous place 100% honestly, you know, I've spent, I think, outside of the UK. It's the longest country I've spent time in, apart from, you know, australia, new Zealand, and Because I walked the Camino de Santiago 33 days across the top of Spain.

Ana Demeny: 1:16:04
Amazing.

Mark Smith: 1:16:05
Yeah, megan, I, megan, megan, I did that just before we moved to the UK and then we had our honeymoon, originally in Barcelona, being back there multiple times, traveled, you know, spend a lot of time in Milan, a lot Milan and what's it? Madrid, madrid, and then in castles around there because we did the thing called Vauntown there, which was teaching Spanish people English, just as a volunteer, and Amazing, amazing, amazing experience. Just yeah, I love that country so much.

Andrew Welch: 1:16:38
Do your, your former students now all sound like squeaky, squeaky kiwis.

Ana Demeny: 1:16:56
Then what you learned this week, chris, making that noise well, that's one thing yeah, it sounds like you're choking a chicken.

Mark Smith: 1:17:03
Man, that sounds like you're choking a chicken.

Ana Demeny: 1:17:05
Hey baby, oh, I do.

Mark Smith: 1:17:11
What are you learning, Chris? What are you learning? What are you learning?

Chris Huntingford: 1:17:14
So this is something I've started to include in presentations when we do ecosystem enablement. And Other than my six-year-old daughter, luna, I don't think anyone can know everything. She's literally. She told me the other day she knows everything. Man, she's like daddy, I know everything. I'm like rock solid dude. We've got a podcast to come on, yeah but yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because, um, what we've discovered is that you know, we go into organizations chatting around ecosystem enablements and actually every time we do it With every customer we learn something totally new. Totally new, I mean like man the one, the one. Organizations like hey Chris, what are your best practices around document management? We're like, oh well, we don't have a, we don't have a work stream for that, so we'll just make one. So we did. And then another one is like hey Chris, what about this weird thing in environment strategy? I'm like, oh dude, I did not know that, but we'll add it. So every time we do this, we keep on growing the Ecosystem, we're delivering to other people. So we've had this thought like, why don't we just connect everyone up? And that was what this whole Thing was about as well. But, like I've started adding this in the decks that I'm positioning because I genuinely don't know the answer to everything. Like I mean, I don't understand purview, I'd love to learn it, but I don't get it. Like I don't understand it, I don't understand fabric, but I want to learn it. But as long as I think what my lesson was is that, as long as I Try and like, remain as like not as gobbie, but I am gobbie, but you know. But try and remain like a little bit humble and think, okay, do I know this thing? No, am I willing to tell people? Yes, sweet, that's going to find the answer. And actually I've learned that so many people are more Reciprocal of, like the fact that I might not know, but I'm super keen to go and find out. And actually I do find out and give the back Bones the answer to them and for the most part, but yeah.

Andrew Welch: 1:19:03
And Chris, as you were saying that I was thinking about, I was thinking about how knowledge you know how knowledge spread a thousand years ago, before, before all the humans in the world had discovered one another, right and Knowledge. A huge part of what was brought back to your, to one's homeland, by Explorers of that era was knowledge of other things and things that they had learned and things that they had seen that no one had seen before. And you know, for the most part, as a, for the most part, we don't always get to experience that, but where we are in this particular world in this particular moment in time, because Nobody so much what we're doing is new and because so many things still have yet to be seen or have yet to be done in a lot of ways and this is a, this is a very hidden value that I think doesn't get talked about enough in in the world of Consulting is that a lot of what you're doing is you're sharing knowledge that you pick up in one place and you're bringing it to all places. You are Fusing knowledge and ideas amongst many different organizations that would not have otherwise Spoken with one another or would have not otherwise shared. I not thought of this until you said that. But I mean gosh, if, if you're evaluating which partner to work with or which consultant you want to work with, do a little testing of how good they are at learning things and admitting when they learn something and being able to take that knowledge and share it with others.

Mark Smith: 1:20:38
Oh man, 100% what you were saying there. You imagine the transformation we could see in the world if industries would learn off other unrelated industries. Oh my god, how are they doing something over there that's totally unrelated to our industry, but the concept, they're thinking their logic behind it. If we apply that to our industry, you know and we've seen it like the toyota way and and where lean Manufacturing and stuff came from in the automotive industry and it's been applied to others, but imagine how many different layers could be unpacked. I think one of the biggest benefits of Microsoft sellers Bring to customers is their cross industry engagement. The other, to bring you know, I've seen this in the southern industry, but that happens less and less now. I know because everyone's like no, you to be industry focused. Yeah, anyhow, things that I'm learning at the moment is figma. I'm doing a course on figma because it is amazing and it's really driven off the back of a sale that we made I'm talking the collective we off a figma design I had Designed around enablement a tool that I've published before in my webinars and stuff and it it was part of the enablement of selling 230,000 seat deployment yes, thousand seat deployment of power Wow's in Germany and it shows that I think we've moved on from a world of. We need to demo everything, as Long as we can tell a story and show the art of the possible, and what figma does allows you to do that. What can be done on the power platform? You don't have to. When I hear people go off quicker for me just to build a power app, I'm like fuck off, your power Looks like shit you.

Ana Demeny: 1:22:29
Awesome.

Mark Smith: 1:22:29
Yeah, and you guess what? The executive layer look at your app and they go are you kidding me? That doesn't look like an iOS app. Right, and the thing is but you, but, but you get a designer to do stuff in figma, and I've do. You know what? I found every figma drawing that my designers produce. I have not had any trouble with my app developers then reproducing it in the app. It's just that they don't have the thinking to actually create that in the power app from the get-go. Now, we didn't talk about Steve Morduz post Pop in and pop out, man, but if you initially have in a bounce, bounce, no, I've got it, I've got it.

Andrew Welch: 1:23:06
Okay, go for it, sir, Sit, sir, um let's take Steve's post in the next episode, because I know Chris was. Chris was in the thick of the Comment stream.

Mark Smith: 1:23:13
Okay, just can you put the post up on screen now, just so the audience can see it and what's coming? Yeah, but it's ready them and then we'll pick it up. Chris, I'll see you next week in Vegas. Yes, dude. Here it may be snowing, there it could get cold. The other thing is. The other thing is that I'm offline the following week, so I'll be the week after I, so I think we've got a two week. I just before we put our next episode out there.

Chris Huntingford: 1:23:48
That's all right, man, we'll just all miss your musk.

Mark Smith: 1:23:51
Not next week, you won't.

Ana Demeny: 1:23:53
Have a lot of fun in Vegas we do. We're really jealous for not being able to be there. We do recommend that people read Steve Morduz blog, which one which one really? Seven part Block post. There it's a. It's a fully flash scenario that tells a lot about the realities of software development, even in low code.

Mark Smith: 1:24:25
Talking about storytelling, this guy knows how to storytell, right. Steve Morduz is our master Storyteller. He can't get better than him, I reckon, in our space when it comes to visualise it right, it's crazy.

Ana Demeny: 1:24:38
Yeah, I love it. What am I?

Andrew Welch: 1:24:40
one of my favorite parts, though, and I'll say it. I think I could not help but notice a reference to one of our one of our co-hosts early on in this series, when he's been Sally goes to the app in a day course with someone named Chris now in Series.

Ana Demeny: 1:24:58
Here, chris is a woman.

Andrew Welch: 1:25:00
But despite the fact that Chris was a woman the whole time, I'm reading about Chris and talking about when she's talking about how this is super simple. Don't worry, sally, you can build this app. It's super simple. In my mind, I'm thinking it's super simple. Listen here. So, chris the woman, have very deep South African man's voice. Awesome all righty guys see you around.

Ana Demeny: 1:25:27
Thanks for a great.

Mark Smith: 1:25:29
There you go. Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ 365 guy. If there's a guest you would like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out. Buy me a coffee. Comm Ford slash NZ 365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars. You.