Welcome to the Ecosystem Show . We're thrilled to have you with us here . We challenge traditional mindsets and explore innovative approaches to maximizing the value of your software estate . We don't expect you to agree with everything . Challenge us , share your thoughts and let's grow together . Now let's dive in . It's showtime . Well , welcome back to the Ecosystem Show .
It's another week .
You can't even keep a straight face .
That's it right , we have this like little silence before we get started and everyone's waiting in anticipation what's next ? Well , welcome back for those of you that are the loyal OneWorth listener that we do have , or watcher of the show , and that would be you , nathan . Thank you for watching . We appreciate you . By the way , that word appreciate you .
Has that become such a big word out of America lately ? What ? Oh , I appreciate you .
Oh , I appreciate this , I appreciate you . Oh , yeah , yeah , yeah .
Oh man it . I appreciate you . Oh yeah , yeah , oh man , it grinds my gears .
It's meant to be a more sincere way of saying thank you . Yeah , well , let's just say thank you it's . I appreciate you Well , but if you use more syllables . It seems more sincere because you put more effort into it .
Wow , it's just become such a cliche at the moment , like particularly what I notice it in , and I'm a bit embarrassed to say this . But love at first sight what is that ?
I still don't understand what this show is uk edition this here is the trashy , uh , the trashy dating show . Episode of the ecosystem show I will not watch this junk when they say this to each other .
I appreciate you , but I'm out like are you serious , like yuck you have no idea how often I'm going to tell you about my appreciation for you mark now regularly . I appreciate you classic .
So we're recording this one week out from all , getting on planes , trains and automobiles and flying away to the lights of Las Vegas , where we will spend lots of money in the casino , we'll entertain , we'll learn about the power platform , we'll probably have a quiet dinner with Charles LaManna .
Speak for yourself , pal .
Won't be quiet . Is that what you're saying ?
No , quiet dinner . Yeah , that's pretty much it .
Yeah , it's never quiet . Have you ever been somewhere like we're in public with Charles LaManna , where there's people from Microsoft land walking past right ? You can't get 30 seconds into a conversation without someone just just mobbing him for a selfie .
Yeah , poor guy yeah , honestly , I feel sorry for somebody in that position in that because you , like you see him take he . He uses what I call the standard fig leaf pose . Have you heard of the fig leaf pose for ? Have you ? Heard of the fig leaf pose for photos . The fig leaf pose is where you put both hands together and you cover your balls .
It's called the fig leaf pose and it's like . It's one of those things like if you haven't been taught about how you know in photography and stuff they teach you , you know , if you're going to pose for something , if it's bendable , you should bend it . Have you heard that term ?
yes , actually I have so , in other words , the elbow bends , bended a bit in the pose , benyon , like let your knee move a bit like , yeah , not the t-rex , but because it brings it brings kind of gravitas to your , your photo , you know , your selfie , or whatever it is it's gonna be . Can we have ?
a rule . Can we have a rule ? Can we have a rule when we are in Vegas , since all four of us will be there that if one of us sees someone else with their hands kind of folded behind their back , that is the sign for I need help Please come help me with this conversation .
And if anybody if I'm talking with anyone at vegas who sees me do that and you recognize it from the show I will buy you a drink can , I , can , I wouldn't be .
Have you ever seen the show teledegan nights the first five , the first five . Have you ever seen the show teledegan nights , the movie ? No , I mean , if you're not first , you're last but he doesn't know what to do with his hands . He's just like this . Please , can you just do your whole ?
talk like this . It's funny that you say that , because have any of you seen Emily in ? Paris . No , Her boss . Whenever she walks she always walks with her hands , kind of like , and she's an older lady , but always , yeah , it's weird .
That's so funny Is that and I don't know if we have Anna back yet , but that might be Emily in Paris , might be the show that our two-and-a-half-year-old is weirdly into , because I guess Emily or one of the main characters looks like her aunt , her aunt Diana .
She's from Chicago , emily , yeah , and like she's an American in Paris . It's really good , mate , it's brilliant . Anyhow , let's get underway , because we're well underway already and those coming to listen to the technical prowess of the people on the show are not getting anything technical .
They're just getting chin-wagging shit .
One of the things as we warm up , I'll bring to the table . A couple of weeks ago , a gentleman in Microsoft by the name of do you remember his name ? Steve Jeffrey , Steve Jeffrey . He released , or he published , on August 20 , 2024 . We're going to let Anna back in . He published a document called the Introduction to the Businessth 2024 .
We're going to let Anna back in . He published a document called the Introduction to the Business Value Toolkit , and it's obviously another kit that's coming out of the CAT team .
What struck me on this is that it really allows the measurement of the impact of the power platform inside an organization Yep Down to the apps , the power platform inside an organization , down to the apps , the automations , et cetera .
So , in other words , rather than you know , yesterday was published the Forrester Total Economic Impact Report for 2024 on the power platform , which has some numbers that totally blow away the past reports in the space and over 200% ROI within six months , like some crazy numbers right being delivered .
And then what I love about this toolkit is that this applies to your own environment , your own environments , your own tenants , so that you can really understand the impact .
Because what I've noticed , particularly in large implementations , when , internally , they go to senior leadership for budget to do more in the following years of using the platform , they often don't have . The folks don't have evidence of the impact that they're creating inside the organization , Like what's the financial impact of these solutions we've deployed ?
What's the ? You know what's the . You know what is the . Is it a cost reduction ? Is it a profit increase ? Did we avoid getting litigated against , you know , if it was a compliance-related thing ?
They've got no tooling to actually structure something that could be presented to the executive that says , hey , isn't this amazing what we retrieved in the last 12 months ?
give us some more budget to do more for this great stuff this is something that that I feel like we've been we , the big , you know , the big community and industry has been struggling with for a long time , and it's not limited to power platform .
I think we should get into later on in the conversation what the application of this is for AI workloads or for , you know , data products and investment in a data platform , et cetera , and how and how it transfers . But I think that's one of the big challenges that that I've had over the years . Right is that I'm a technologist , right , I'm an architect .
I am not an organizational economist , I'm not an accountant . I'm not . I have no personal specialty or expertise in business value assessment , and you know , so I think that that a lot of and this is , of course , true across the industry .
So there's a lot of people , a lot of organizations that have really failed to make quantitative dollars and cents , pounds and pennies , euros and whatever hundreds of a euro are called cents , I guess , anyway , have failed to make these arguments because , one , many people lack the expertise and there hasn't been a good tool .
Many people lack the expertise and there hasn't been a good tool . I mean , there's been this tool called shark finesse that you know , those of us have been in this for a while . You know , know and have used , but shark finesse is not the most approachable thing for a novice Over the top right .
It isn't extreme , so extreme that people just stop using it because it was too cumbersome in and and what it was doing yeah , I don't , I don't understand .
I mean , I get , I get the tooling , but , like man , my p-brain doesn't deal with , deal with that type of stuff . I think , I think so I I get this all the time right .
When we talk to organizations about what is the roi , what is the value , yeah , like struggle with this a lot , and it's mainly because when organizations adopt the tools like Microsoft Office , they didn't ROI every email they sent or every Excel they made . They didn't go . What's the ROI on the spreadsheet that I'm going to make ?
They just naturally assumed that , well , it's part of business productivity . So this is something we should do , right . And when email came out , they didn't go . What is the ROI of me sending this email to any of you ? It wasn't a thing , it was just considered business productivity . Yeah , and then I get why you need to do ROI against things .
But the problem that I have is that when you look at the tools like Steve has got and I think it's a good tool , by the way , I think it's a good tool . I've seen it in action , I know how it works , I understand what he's done I feel like this is going to be overkill , and I'll tell you why ?
Because every organization that's got any , every CFO that's got anything to do with a implementation of a platform , is going to say what is the ROI on every app or flow that you make ? And you can't do that ? It doesn't work Like . I get anchor apps ? Yes , absolutely yeah for sure .
But I think that when organizations get over , carried away with ROI , it becomes more of an inhibitor than anything else , and that's what I found .
Yeah , but I think you're arrogant , chris .
And that's what I found .
Yeah , but I think you're arrogant , Chris . Is that because I refuse to sell any AI solutions that haven't gone through a governance board ? I heard that was a thing as well .
Classic man Classic . No , what I was going to say is that you know , for me , in a tool like this , I'd be squarely in a team , not squealing . I would be going to my PM , my PM just as part of the delivery process , or whoever the program manager is . This is a tool that you need to own and deliver the outputs back to the executive .
It's just part of doing the job type thing . It's not a one-time point thing that we do .
I think that tooling like that is very useful , because oftentimes our job is to actually help the CTO or the CEO to show value , or the CEO to show value , and they haven't got time to listen to us go on about technology and AI and about waves of adoption and enhancements and stuff like that .
What they want to do is be able to have a one-pager that says we are better than anyone else because we use this technology , and the result is this much ROI , the end that that's all they want , and so having a tool for that is brilliant , because , for for now , we're making it up , right , yeah I just see it allows for store good storytelling right .
I just watched recently lumen technologies in the us . They have done a big ai piece inside the organization . It's probably one of my microsoft's hero case studies right now around Copilot implemented and they've got some amazing stats that have come out and the stats tell a great story right . Four hours saved per sales agent .
That's a $54,000 per person per annum cost saving . It's just like data points like that . They ran a hackathon and saved 4,000 hours from some of the ideas that came out . It's like those dot points that business goes whoa .
This is amazing , like let's do more and it's just really giving the kind of gravitas to let's keep doing more of this , because these are exciting stories that have been told and a tool like this potentially gives you those numbers .
It doesn't matter whether you're a developer or a project manager , or you are the team lead or the practice leader , it doesn't matter who you are .
Sort of tools and being able to articulate what the results of your work is are um will propel your career , and that's that's very important right , if we are to live in a , in an era of um , even human connection . If you will and if you want to progress and learn new skills which we must do we need to have .
This is one of the prerequisites , I think Nice .
Yeah , it is , but okay , so I'm going to kind of , I'm going to agree , but I'm going to come back with detail . How many organizations do you know you can go to and say can you define the concept of value ? Yeah , because this tool requires you to put in value concepts as , like , line items . Okay , and it's the same thing , okay .
My favorite one is this I had a conversation with somebody recently . We were talking about the criticality of a solution . So I said , cool , cool , cool . Define criticality . Like what does critical mean to you ?
And they were like , well , you know , if it creates downtime in the office , I'm like , yeah , but you can still do it manually , right , like you can still do the thing manually . So , like , think about the concept of criticality and what does that mean ? Now , switch that over to value . Like what does value mean to you ?
And if you go to the CFO , value is crap , loads of money saved If you go to the CEO , retaining people and creating time , and then .
So you have to basically build out value concepts , and that's why this tool is cool , but it is an end product to a much bigger play here , and that play is defining the whole ecosystem before you put things into a bunch of boxes .
I've been thinking about this , and then I'll use an example from outside of tech , but one of the things that I worry about is that our society has lost , I think , in a lot of ways , the ability to make judgments as to the goodness or the badness , or the usefulness or the non usefulness or the .
You know , we've lost a lot of our ability , or maybe a lot of our confidence , in making judgments about things if we don't have some sort of study or some sort of data to to prove it . And so here's a good example Anna and I , after we record this , are going to go cycling . Okay , we love to do that .
It's something that I've done for many years , and that is my exercise right Now . I don't need a watch with data about how many calories I burned , right To tell me that cycling is good . It makes me feel good , it is enjoyable , it is fresh air , it is sunshine . You know what I mean . It is all of these sorts of things .
But so often , and particularly in business , I think that leaders hide behind what they perceive to be a lack of data or a lack of you know , god has provided these figures and therefore the thing is good . And I , when I say hide behind it . I think that we we often use this . Oftentimes , when I hear someone say , well , what's the ROI of that app ?
Or what's the ROI of that , you know ? As Chris says , what's the ROI of that spreadsheet ? Right ? I often hear a I don't want to have to make a strategic judgment . Yes , so I . Therefore I'm going to invoke somehow a lack of data in order to defend my inaction in doing in making a strategic judgment . Love it . So you know , I don't think that we should .
You know , I think that I said at the beginning , I think that this business value assessment and this ability for laymen lay persons who don't specialize in this field to be able to measure ROI , that is 100% a good thing .
But what I want , what I also think we need to be careful of , is that we don't use this as yet another way to hide behind actually being leaders , right , and actually making strategic judgments . That's important .
If I do something like that and I realize I haven't got my Apple Watch on or my Aura Ring , I'm like , did it even count ? Because I didn't measure it . And the thing is , I am a data-driven person and I see those results and I'm like I'm going to do that again tomorrow Like it's a motivating thing for me .
And I think what and if I draw the parallel to this tool , is that I'm not talking about this tool upfront in a project . I'm talking about if you have the platform as a strategic tool inside your organization and you're going to have programs of work that are going to run year after year after year .
It is good that you have quantified the value that it brings , because people hire up that are not day-to-day , they don't know the technology , they don't know the value and they're making a decision between this and 500 other products . I think that drives value when you can quantify what your technology is producing for the organization .
As to you know , bob that doesn't have any idea the value his SAP platform or Pega platform is bringing .
I also think that what Chris was saying earlier , and how hard it is to set this tool up and how much thinking you have to do in advance , isn't that part of strategy .
So the moment you're committing to using it , you're like , okay , so now I'm going to have to do all this hard work , and if they cannot do it themselves , that's what we're consultants , right ?
That's exactly it . Yeah , Anna , that's what I was getting at . It's looking at it and you're right . So I wouldn't go to a company and be like , yeah , have the business value toolkit why .
No , it's kind of like Well , that's what we did with the COE starter kit . Yes , we did .
Yeah , here have governance .
This is governance . Here you go .
We screwed it up right , I think , with this tool and I love , anna , what you said there because , as I said , I go through this with customers all the time . I go through BVA type stuff I'll go through what is ROI , what is value , what is qualitative , what is quantitative , what does it mean to you ?
So I sit in these change management workshops driving these types of behaviors and we log them in Excel , right . So we're like , okay , let's put them in that Excel spreadsheet and we can track ROI against that . What I find interesting here is that , yes , it's a framework , but it's what I think is clever in the stool .
It's the overlay on all of it that he's got , because he's got some very , very clever maths and some AI that actually does some pretty impressive things on top of those numbers .
So once you've gone through the iceberg… of the bottom part of the iceberg , of what is all the value nonsense , and you get to that top layer , I feel like this is where the value is in this tool .
Yeah , and I think that the tool needs to be accompanied by , like it needs to be paired also with an approach right ? Yes , so we talk all the time about anchor apps and one of the things that I see organizations doing with with power platform right is that , if anything , organizations are not ambitious enough with how they use power platform .
They make this big investment , they maybe do some work around you know platform governance and getting the thing set up , and then what they do is they use Power Platform for trivial or little productivity , toy type apps . They don't build the anchor apps that are really necessary in order to move the needle on value .
Or they say , oh , we'll build the anchor apps later . And if you look at kind of the cost curve of a composable economic strategy , which I just Mark I don't know if you saw I just covered this in a lesson I recorded for this course .
It's coming out in a couple of weeks , but you know , anchor apps , building the anchor apps , swinging for the fences , so to speak , early on in the adoption , is how you're going to drive a lot of that value and how you're going to bank a lot of that value so that you can then go build some of the niche use cases or the more niche type scenarios .
So I would say , take this tool and pair it with a strategy that front loads modernization or net new development of big anchor apps , and then measure the value , not of the thing for the finance team that no one else knows about , but use it to measure the value of the big anchor apps . That's why we call them anchor apps .
They anchor your implementation of Power Platform across the ecosystem . That's the value you should measure .
Yeah , nice . So , dude , if you think so , think about it like this . I have , in any Power Platform state or AI state , right now I use the concept of T-shirt sizing from a solution perspective . So there are certain categories that a solution gets bopped into right .
So , if you take like five categories extra small all the way to extra large , okay , pretty straightforward . So extra smalls , smalls and mediums , like they have certain criteria . Number one I don't actually care where you build extra smalls , build them in default . I don't give a damn IT , don't support your default environment , so therefore I don't care .
Correct , okay , makers support their own tools . I don't care about your analytics , Sort it out yourselves . Whereas mediums , actually , that's getting onto the blurred line of this is where the process is different . So , if you think about a journey that you draw for a maker , if you think about a line splitting out into three forks , okay , three prongs .
The first prong is straight . It's like extra smalls and smalls in default . No one cares , crack on and do your thing . But then you have this medium line at the top and that's like , actually , you're building something a little bit more complex . You want to involve more team members , but you want to be doing BVA against this .
You want to be saying what is the return on investment of us spending time on this thing ? So part of your maker journey is actually adding in this piece of the process .
So instead of a five-step process to productionizing something , it is now a 12-step process because you're going to go through a much more stringent set of rules and that's where the stuff comes in .
Yeah , and that's where the stuff comes in ?
Yeah , so so shall we . Um , I'm looking at the at the clock mark . Shall we uh , uh , preview a little bit from the the conference that when this episode airs , the conference will be next week . Should we uh ? Should we finish off that way ? Yeah ?
Yeah , I think that'd be great . As in , we're all excited , yeah right .
Yeah , all of us yes all of us .
All of us . So , andrew , what are you thinking ?
So the I don't know how much we should give away , but I should say this We've got , um , we've got one major , major , major piece of content , or big thinking , or um , uh , something that that folks can use , uh , in their daily work . That's going to come out each day of the conference .
So we've got a new white paper Scaling your Enterprise Cloud with Power Platform . We've been collaborating with another organization on a white paper called the ecosystem oriented architecture for the public sector .
And then we have a bit of a surprise , but I'll say this a framework and a model to help organizations not just get started with their artificial intelligence journey , but to to also measure their maturity and to measure their progress and to really understand , kind of , where they are and target their investments in the most effective ways .
So that has been a mammoth project and we're really excited to release it . And then Mark's got one as well that he's been working on . Have I got one or three ? It depends on how you want to slice it . I mean , go for it .
So one of the things we're doing on the Cloud Lighthouses he's been working on have I got one or three , it depends on how you want to slice it .
I mean , yeah , go for it so we've one of the things we're doing under cloud lighthouse is is getting a bunch of our ip consumable and and that is because in a lot of the events that have been presented at , people are like , yeah , but you know , this seems to be this workshop is part of a much broader way of thinking , et cetera .
And so how do I get more ?
And so what we've done is set up a learncloud lighthouse that you can go to , and we're going to start we plan to drop three courses next while the conference is on and so you can go deeper into a lot of these thinkings If you're in an architectural role and you really need can go deeper into a lot of these thinkings if you're in architectural role , when
you really need to go deeper , um , we've got three courses which are just small ones to start with , but they're leading into some very um , deep thinking , precise thinking around ecosystems and around ai strategies , which are not productcentric but really much more broader in empowering you in the way you think about projects , solutions that you're going to implement ,
etc .
Well , and I feel like we've been talking about training for ecosystem architects for so long now that we're finally doing it . The first courses have been recorded , so they're on their way yeah , hooray so we're dropping them anywhere .
Yeah , it was a cell five , you can't see .
Yeah , cell five I love it . Cell five I like it highly .
I respect man so , yeah , looking forward to it . Love to get your feedback . If you're at the conference , come and see us . Come say hi , come and uh , if you hit me up and say , hey , I heard your heard your uh ecosystem show there and you promised to buy me a drink , I will buy you a drink if you come up and tell me that .
Um , so yeah , looking forward to seeing you all is that an open invitation or just the first five ?
just the first . No , it's an open invitation it's .
It's an open invitation .
It's an open invitation . It's an open invitation .
Yeah , okay , yeah , yeah yeah , that's wild .
Oh , I tell you what I did . Something just to wrap with I like to buy motivation . Have you ever heard this concept of buying motivation ?
No , no , no , you mean like you go buy a new backpack .
I mean because that's what I do when I want to get my money , Dude you and your backpacks .
It's a problem .
It is a problem .
So this is what I did . There's a lady that I follow in the AI space and you know there's so much around AI and there's so much snake oil and stuff out there and everybody's got a new AI product , you know , and this lady is on the Forbes 30 under 30 or whatever .
She's exited her first AI business already and she's 29 years old and she just gives away tons and tons of the way she's thinking about stuff . And so she dropped this video .
That said , I've never been on social media , but 100 days ago I joined social media and she goes I , just a hundred days later , had a hundred thousand followers from a standing zero , start , right . And she , all she did was this was her model Every day , I'll post at least one video , but I'll try to do five videos a day .
Hence why you're seeing me drop these videos , cause I . This is what I did . I'm like man , this is a great idea 100 videos in 100 days , but potentially 500 videos in 100 days , right , five a day . And so I was like , damn , I'm going to do that . It was just like an instant , like I'm going to do that . So I'm going to face the camera .
It's a new way of doing stuff . I'm going to give that a crack and I was like let's buy some motivation .
So I went to a WhatsApp group that I have of the alumni community that have been through the 90 Day Mentoring Challenge , and so over 1,200 people have been through the 90 Day Mentoring Challenge , so there's a few people in there and so I said I will give $1,000 to anybody the first person that points out the first day that I miss posting a video in the
next 100 days .
That's genius . See that's buying motivation . That's genius . I think that's really clever and also expensive .
Right , I don't want to give away $1,000 US . So , man , I get up in the morning I'm like bang , what am I going to do today ? What's my video going ?
to be on . Oh my God .
I find social media to be so overwhelming and so exhausting . There's no way but . But the thing is , for me it's . It's not the social media , it's . I'm getting a new skill right which has been able to make sure that you can communicate a concept in a very short amount of time and do it in a way that connects with the other person I'm out and that's .
You know , it's not about being verbose , right , it's been about absolutely concise , terse to the point . So , yeah , it's , it's uh , it's a skill I want to develop , and I'm just , whilst also not being gen z I don't think that anyone is watching Mark's videos thinking , look at that Gen Z guy , look at that Gen Z .
What I mean is that you didn't necessarily learn this in school or you didn't have to do . You weren't in the Snapchat generation where you had to summarize a thing in 30 seconds or less . You're not doing TikTok every day and it's like super easy for you . It's hard , you know these things are hard . It's a new muscle .
I was just reading this article that that was saying that we should all look for for new jobs because jobs are changing all around us , even if you aren't changing your jobs . So that's yeah . I thought that was a very , very interesting concept , so I guess it ties a little bit into into what you're saying .
It's just for you know , building a new skill potentially a very expensive way of building a new skill , but yeah , yeah , yeah only only if I don't deliver right .
Anyhow , love you all . See you next time , see you later , dudes . Bye , bye , bye , guys , bye . Thanks for tuning into the ecosystem show . We hope you found today's discussion insightful and thought-provoking , and maybe you had a laugh or two . Remember your feedback and challenges help us all grow , so don't hesitate to share your perspective .
Stay connected with us for more innovative ideas and strategies to enhance your software estate . Until next time , keep pushing the boundaries and creating value . See you on the next episode .