 Christian Buckley with another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Paul. Hey, good morning. Morning. How are you? You're Saturday morning. I love that. It's the APAC people that it's like late on my Friday afternoon, early morning for you. Paul, thank you. Finally, you're finally here. How long have you been in MVP now? Five years, maybe four or five years, something like that. Entire time, pretty much. Been trying to inviting you to come out and participate in one of these things and you just shut me down at every step. Well, you know, you and me have a history. I know. That's what I'm sticking to. It's like I've interviewed him like a dozen times, other things. For folks that don't know who you are, where you are, what you do, why don't you give us that rundown? Okay, so where I am, Perth, Western Australia. Which is in present circumstances, probably literally the best place in the world you could ever be since it's super isolated, which is in a country that's also somewhat isolated. So that's where the audience will love if you brag about COVID status and the lack of impact in your part of the world. People love that. So go out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I mean, in all seriousness, I'm not always bragging that Perth is the best place in the world because from a work point of view, it can actually be fairly difficult. Hence, we're here talking on Saturday morning, my time, right? So, but in terms of what I do, I have a company called Seven Sigma, which is a bit of a joke on Six Sigma. It's like, well, go out one more. Why not? And we've been in business for many, many years. I was a SharePoint person for quite a long time, toiled and toiled and toiled, but I never was an MVP for SharePoint. And then pivoted over to the Power Platform and have been playing around in that world ever since. So now I'm like, oh, this is how the dynamics people live, right? I get this now. So it's been a bit of the merging of those two worlds. So yeah, that's pretty much me, I guess. We've been in this space for quite a long time now. And sort of one of the early adopters, my view on Power Platform actually was, you know how with SharePoint, I think a lot of us in that era, you yourself included, I'm sure. For me, it was 2006, late 2006, when the 2007 version of SharePoint came out and I just sat back and went, oh, this is going to be huge. This is going to change everything. And then it really clicked. I think it became the mainstream. It's like when InXS hit it big in the US, that mainstream click over that for the SharePoint, it was 2010. But yeah, people caught the vision of that's when I caught the vision of it was coming into 2007. Yeah, that was me. So that was the first time in my career where I was like, okay, I'm going to specialize because you know, done a bit of document management before, you know, have sort of broad knowledge. And I got the same feeling again when I first saw Power Platform, even in a super, super infancy. And there was a whole bunch of reasons which we can explore if you want to. But that made me go, oh, I'm getting the whole SharePoint Bible over again, time to pivot. And that was turned out to be a good thing to do. So yeah, I'm interested. So with your company, and you guys were doing a lot of different things, it wasn't just about SharePoint, certainly. So are you doing like a lot of PowerPoint type activities with customers now? Sure. And I assume when you say PowerPoint, you meant Power Platform. Yeah, there's the powers. So for us now, SharePoint is merely a convenient data store. That's the way I put it. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It's SharePoint is a terrific way to, because I back up a bit, because I spent a lot of years doing SharePoint, unlike perhaps people who've come at Power Platform from the Dynamics view, and they tend to be like, oh, SharePoint, why would you put anything there? In terms of capturing value and demonstrating value and getting to a place where you might use the other tools like Dataverse and things like that, that was the place to go. And we had proven that you could store lots of data in SharePoint if you had an architect. And so we just continued with that. So SharePoint was literally the perfect gateway to then our Power Platform maybe put another way was a way to activate SharePoint in a way that had never been done before because suddenly you had all these apps in the field that were capturing media and tagging it appropriately or going back into SharePoint being reported on. That was actually pretty amazing because back then SharePoint didn't really have a mobile solution as such. Or the one that was there was generic from the perspective of SharePoint. Whereas if you turn it around and go, I want to build an app to do X and I just happen to store it in SharePoint because I have media and I want to be able to tag and all that sort of thing. SharePoint didn't have anything for that. It was defined by its own terms of reference. And so I did this early app and once I saw that, that was it. It was like, this is going to be massive and I need to really invest in this. The last MVP summit in person, there were a couple SharePoint MVPs that I didn't see most of the week because they had been overhanging out with the Power Platform people. And I think that was over in the main, the big expo hall area on campus. And I remember having a conversation with the two of them. They're like, this is huge. I don't think I'm going to use SharePoint again. Yeah. Yeah. And I was sitting next to a couple of them having that reaction. I remember one turned to me at one point where we were looking at, I think it was portals. And he just turned to me and goes, SharePoint's dead. And I don't think it's quite dead yet. But also SharePoint's evolved. It's not so much. I wouldn't say that few people would describe themselves as a SharePoint practitioner now because it's part of the Office 365 ecosystem. So there's the team's factor. There's even tools like Planner and various other bits that integrate. And even a dash of Power BI thrown into that mix. And so that convergence of SharePoint becoming a key part of something bigger has been characterization of how Microsoft operates since forever. And you can see now. Like with the launch of Office 365 branding was like, well, wait a second. There were actually people going to conferences that are like, wow, they mentioned Office 365 20 times but only mentioned SharePoint twice. What does that mean? And kind of reading into it. And I said, well, look, there was kind of a shift in thinking and it was that it was moving to more of an infrastructural role. And it was also in Microsoft. In fact, Jeff Teeper was very clear about wanting to do away with, get rid of, stop talking about SharePoint as a Swiss army knife for every possible solution that's out there. And so that was the turning of the tide where people really started to understand Microsoft's longer term play. Yeah. Now, I think anyone that had been in the space for a while, you get an instinct for how Microsoft think after, you know, 20 whatever years, because I'm old now. But I could see even from 365 that they were started, even if you take SharePoint and you start breaking up the bits like search and workflow and all the other traditional components, you can see that Microsoft as soon as it was in the 365 world now becoming a SaaS platform as a service type vendor, it made perfect sense to decouple things like workflow and create a best of breed solution for that and tie it back to SharePoint via web services, you know, and everything became loosely coupled. So that idea of the monolithic, you know, SharePoint with every bit member the pie, all of those bits all tied in the SharePoint. Well, now it's like every one of those bits of the pie. If you actually focus on them, you can create a best of breed product, tie it back to SharePoint, and then you activate it for literally every other Office 365 service. And then things like compliance becomes a whole lot easier because you have a whole of service now things for, you know, DLP and all of those sort of information, life cycle type things, information governance scenario. Yep. And that becomes a pretty compelling proposition, right? Because now you can say, you know, power platform, this is where it fits in, you can say, well, why, why would you go and buy this SaaS app, where suddenly the information is outside of your cloud, you don't have control of it, you can't govern it in a way consistently with everything else, like you've got this other island of info over here, you could actually take a solution and probably build a power platform solution around it and actually keep it 100% within that one cloud, which usually makes the information governance people happy, cybersecurity people happy, and Power BI people happy because I get to actually make meaning out of it. That makes sense. When Microsoft Teams went live just over five years ago, and I think it's, are we coming up on the five year, I think it is the five year anniversary in January. They're all pretty young, they're all pretty young tools. But when people that like, coming from like the governance world and both of us worked and talked and very much, you know, in that world, and people had questions about that. And I said, wait a second, like the core architecture of Teams is built on SharePoint and Exchange, two very mature platforms. That means all of the investments, all of the management tools, migration, like all of those pieces, like they still have a role, they still are exist because that's where continents, that's obviously it's gotten a bit more layered and complex. There's other moving parts to it. But that's how it is. I actually literally just last night had a conversation with a buddy who has product idea and was asking questions about building and leveraging it on Microsoft platform and how to go and build this thing out. And I said, well, look at the domain. One of the beauties of this is that you have all of those components, all of that history that you instantly tap into with, which instantly elevates your new product offering by having all those other pieces. And if you make sure that your stuff works and fits within the framework, then you're going to be able to leverage all those and have a great story. Yeah. Look, I look forward to a future where I think the trajectory and now I'm just rampantly speculating this isn't based on any actual facts. But if you look at where things are going, it's like, I'll look at it this way. This is how I explain things to like AWS folks, right? AWS and Azure is like Lego. All of the pieces are there and you have the full freedom to build those pieces as you wish. So that's if you sort of compare those two. But if you then look at the Office 365 suite, that's like a walled garden. That's a software as a service you get in there. And yes, you can tweak it, but fundamentally it's provided. And then you've got like Power Platform sitting kind of in between that abstracts some of the complexities of the Lego. And I think that's where the disruption happens because that's an area where a lot of Microsoft's competitors miss the boat, right? Because they've got infrastructure as a service type, you know, the model like that, that layer, that side of it, like more of the infrastructure as a service rather than exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, so in terms of then where it's going, you've now got these three core components where you've got and they're all integrated together. So, you know, Power Platform is that middleware that allows you to actually avoid doing a whole bunch of bespoke infrastructure as a service stuff, right? And I think, yeah, for example, if I'm using Azure now, I would never use it to provision virtual machines and stuff like that. It's just, that's not my world anymore. That's that I use platform as a service tools, but I still for the last mile things you might use Azure Function just to do something or some of the, you know, some of the data services just to do a bit of transformation just to get data in. So, but the point is as a product developer where the conversion is, I think you'll end up with whole software as a service offerings in a few years that clients would never know that it's actually underpinned by Power Platform. They just know that it's a SaaS offering that's just going to sit on top of the 365 client, you know, which is what they know. So, that's kind of where the conversion is. I think the disruption now is a lot of folks who went from on-prem to cloud and thought they were the disruptors because, hey, server huggers, you're not, you know, no, no, no more servers. There is a song about that, isn't there? There is a song about that. Yeah, we'll come back to that. But no, what's being disrupted now are the Lego folks who, you know, their paradigm didn't change. You just move from one place to the other if you like, you know, and but now you come along with Power Platform and it's like, you don't even have to do any of even that stuff. Literally producing an app is I have a browser, I build the app, I publish it, it's there, it's available for people. And we've had the been fortunate enough to do it at scale on some larger organizations. And so, you know, anyone who is reconciling the dissonance of the Lego being, you know, spy going like this, usually goes, oh, well, that's only for the small stuff, you know, because Power Platform is for the basic stuff, I'm here to tell you, no, don't even, if you think that way, you've already been disrupted, you just don't know it, that's you reconciling the fact that the paradigm shifting. So yeah, look, I think there's a hugely bright, bright future because you take the rapid ability of low code sitting on top of Azure and those supporting Azure services and you can roll some very sophisticated solutions together at scale faster considerably faster than you would have done if you were just rolling over Lego yourself. Is it fair to say like you just slipped into like the phrasing, the low code solution? And you know, what are the complaints that I hear from people that are really that are business folk and there's like, look, like I get it. And it's, and it's much simpler than going up, we're not coding solutions. And yes, I can go figure things out. But it's a, there's a lot more meat on the bone, there's a more technical, you know, know how like you can build a specialty around that, like having people that are technically minded or having that skill set to go and do it. And to build it, it's not for somebody like, Hey, just every marketing person can jump in there and be building. Yeah, the most basic things, yes. But there is some complexity that you can also build and most organizations want more of that complexity as well. So there, there is, I mean, I go back to my thinking around this too, is that, you know, you had, you know, a few years back, a lot of concern with the shift towards the cloud. The big question is like, what's happening with the it pro role? And, and, you know, it's, it's going to the business or your hardcore Dev and, and those were losing those jobs and saying, no, like though we need to have people that have that technical knowledge, that skill that experience, it's shifting, you have to know more about the business. But I think a lot of those are finding a home within this world. It is not developer engineering. It's certainly not, I wouldn't put it in classified as business user. I think, you know, citizen development is, you know, it's a confusing phrase for it. I would put this squarely within that it pro role. And I think it's broader. You have people that are don't have the formal engineering background, and there's more of a ramp for them to get in and learn and upskill there. But you have to have a knowledge. You have to have some debt. You have to go and focus for the more complex solutions. It's more of an engineering. Yeah, nothing. You're absolutely right. So what I would say my response, there's a multifaceted response to that actually, because of course, I, you know, my daughter is now, you know, very good at this stuff as well. And she for sure has no background in that stuff. So what I would say is at the level you're talking about, so just to make sure our assumptions are right, we're talking the complex solutions now, you know, like a whole of organization enterprise type solution. Good architecture is good architecture, whether it's a spoke or whether it's done on the platform, you know, you have to have that level of depth. And folks who have that engineering kind of infrastructure background tend to have a good instinct for that, because they're usually the ones that had to deal with bad architecture in the past. Because that's why they kind of and you know, this is I'm in that same bucket. The reason you end up saying no a lot of the time is because you were inherited something that you had no part in coming up with that was poorly architected, you have to deal with the legacy. So that's kind of where that comes from. So no, you're absolutely right. But where the innovation lies. And this is the essence of governing the power platform, by the way, for folks who are interested in this huge time. It's a very important. Yeah, it is. And look, you know, you and I did governance for many, many years in SharePoint and some of those key concepts haven't changed, because just like SharePoint, in fact, think about it this way, SharePoint is kind of like the low code platform of the early, the late 2000s that needed to be there to kind of give rise to power platform, because at the end of the day, you could get a talented business user, give them access, and they will whack on web parts and do all sorts of clever data aggregations like that. Right, SharePoint grew so quickly. It was the shadow IT effort of the enterprise. Correct. So the problem is less of a continuing power platform. I'm going to make that claim. And that's coming from someone who had to deal with the legacy of SharePoint, gone wild and gone rampant. But that's because you can actually reconcile these two worlds. You can have one environment in power platform that can be highly managed with ALM integration with Azure services or even AWS services, just integration with other things. And you can manage that as a proper production, go through the life cycle type enterprise environment. And it could be a single instance environment, just like one application, which is essentially dynamics when it works that way. But then on the other side, you've got the environment where you can encourage citizen users to go in and do things and make mistakes and do all the things you need to go through to learn. Because every one of us that's good at SharePoint, at one point sucked at SharePoint, we were just savvy enough to realize that we sucked, right? That's every expert is was once a really bad moron, right? At some point. So the means, so then it's like, well, how do you reconcile that? You know, you have all these apps everywhere. Well, the great thing about power platform and low code is we've built a governance framework, an active management governance framework around this. So imagine that you have a bunch of flows, power automate flows, and they just go around your entire environment and enumerate every app, every flow, every custom connector, every maker who built one, all of that, stick it in a dataverse repository and put Power BI over top of that. And so immediately you have enterprise visibility over everything. So I routinely go into the Center of Excellence Dashboards and I say, go to the makers. And I say, what connectors has makers been using? And if Christian Buckley suddenly popped up and was using SharePoint and Teams and Outlook and connecting to all these different things, that tells me something. That's the data point that says, we might have a super user here that I didn't know about. That's a severe security breach that should, the security folks should be involved. I always make friends with security folks. I'm an ex security guy, by the way. So before any of SharePoint, before any of that, I was a CISSP. So I was a guy actually doing it. In fact, I found security compliance kind of boring. Sorry, security folks, but it's a lot more prevalent and important that it is kind of back then because it wasn't, everything wasn't as online. I'm talking early 2000s. But with that instinct, the fact that I can produce a dashboard to security folks and any question they have, I can answer it gives them assurance. And that's all they're looking for. They want to see that there's a control for a risk and sometimes that control is visibility over the landscape. So that gives you 100% granular, incredible analytics. And we've extended that even to Teams and SharePoint. So I'm using Power Platform to govern SharePoint now. Now you can start building power apps that automate some of those compliance processes. So now the next level of maturity is Christian Buckley comes to my organization, having prior experience with power apps, pretty much signs in, decides to build their first app. The system realizes that, oh, wait a second, you make a, oh, haven't seen this person before. Let's send them the welcome pack that links them to the SharePoint site with some information, some guidelines and various other bits and pieces. And then any app that they provision, after six months, sends them a reminder to say, hey, go back in and just can you let us know you're still owning this app, is it still used, that kind of thing. So there's just a couple of examples of where you've been able to take that middle place between the Azure stuff and the software as a service to actually activate that. Now, a lot of cloud service infrastructure folks will basically write a bunch of Azure runbooks, which is PowerShell running in the cloud and they'll do it that way. They don't realize that Power Automate literally connects to just about everything. It can activate those scenarios with a hell of a lot less work, easier to debug and easier to collectively manage compared to some dude's script that's sitting in a runbook that is doing all sorts of custom kind of things with custom logic. So that's kind of how I'm able to reconcile that. So unlike, I gotta tell you, if we had the sort of analytics that the Power Platform provides back when SharePoint was being, the SharePoint government challenge was there, it would have been a very different world because the minute you make the unknown known, aka any question you ask me, I can answer, the fear goes away. And it actually lifts the conversation to connecting it back to business goals. So instead of going, oh, while we're going to be scary, it's, okay, we have a means to manage this. Now it's like, so what are the key roles we're going to need in decision making and how are we going to align this to this particular goal? So it's been, that's what excites me about it. Like, you know, you're not governing for the sake of just pure risk mitigation, you're actually governing for the sake of activating some outcome. And the baseline governance is just so easy because it doesn't take much to deploy COE and you've got all the data you need for decision making. So, so yeah, I don't know, have I mellowed out since then? Because, you know, like, I have never been a governance person for the sake of shutting things down. At the end of the day, if all you do to govern something is shut it down, then all you're doing is mitigate any risks. You might as well just call it risk mitigation. It's not governance governance is there to activate opportunities. And if you don't know what those opportunities are, then you're not governing in the first place. Because, yeah, I've always said means to an end, right? So, so yeah. So I think power platform is like the citizen developer, you know, SharePoint was a key pillar and needed to happen. And, you know, obviously the dynamics world as well. And then you've got now power platform that just is the evolution of that kind of low code. You've got, yeah, the range of users, notwithstanding the architecture point we made earlier on the complex solutions, the range of users is pretty crazy. You know, there's, there's people from all walks of life that have built very sophisticated things. And there's lots of peace on that too and organizations that are concerned about, you know, and that that's part of, you know, the culture of your organization. I've heard from people and, you know, over the years talking about governance and, and not wanting to restrict allowing people to go and get their work done. And I've had people that said flat out, it's like, well, look, my, my primary end users, I don't want them anywhere near any of these tools to go and do anything like there needs to be somebody who's trained, who's authorized, who can go and do that. I said, look, you can have different types of users that are, that are out there, whatever's appropriate for your organization, your culture, like that, that fit. I guess that's the difference is that there's, there's flexibility, and there's not just one way to go in there and control. Yeah, no, look, you can do it. I mean, now the power platform, one thing that probably irritates some conservative admins is the fact that the default power platform environment is open, and people can go in there and use it. So when I say default environment, consider it like the sandpit, the playpen, whatever, but there is a way to get in there and build apps. And people can make that, you know, they can turn it off by doing things like conditional access policies, and they can turn it off by removing licenses and things like that. But that's a really, you know, that that's a pretty, you know, it's like using a, well, a hammer to crack a walnut kind of scenario. And I think that what I remind them is, okay, if you go back, everything Microsoft are doing, because typically it's like, why do Microsoft do this and, you know, allow everyone to do this? And it's like, well, their mission statement is pretty clear. It says empower everyone. It does not say empower IT departments to turn it off when they feel the need. If that was their mission statement, sure, it would be off by default. But if your mission says empower everyone, and they're being true to that mission, then it makes everything they're doing is rational. It makes sense, right? And so they've in their heart of hearts decided that that's a better outcome than the turn it off by default kind of outcome. I'm sure that there are other considerations like, you know, if their competitors do that, then clearly, you know, it's a pathway to a competitor if they allow it. And you don't, which exacerbates the shadow IT problem. So that's where that mindset you can shoot yourself in the foot, because the problem you're trying to solve is only just shifted somewhere else to a cloud outside of your control without the same kind of information governance. Part of it too, Microsoft has always been really good at presenting opportunities for partners to go in and close some of those gaps. And part of it too is, it's like, look, again, an organization that is, you know, more control focused or understands their collaboration culture and what needs to be in place there and wants to have needs to have a more lockdown environment. They could be a highly regulated area. They have a children place. And so there are, of course, ways to do that. And there are partner solutions that help do that. So it's not that, you know, hey, to use this stuff is quite open and good luck. Yep. No, look, if it's a regulated area, let's actually taking that example is not a bad example, because as I said, you've always got the option, the nuclear options, you can just remove the license. So it's precluded. That's it. But for example, that also precludes the ability to go into SharePoint, which you might allow, and then tailor the SharePoint form with a PowerApp, because now those, you know, as Microsoft integrate those services, you can have more side effects than you expect. So then the question becomes, what if within half an hour of that happening, I'm able to basically alert that to you and you can take a remit, you know, corrective action on it. So for that's a scenario where you say, okay, let's assume that someone could go in and make an app. And let's assume that in making that app, they then used a connector and there's, oh, your SharePoint example, there's like one SharePoint site you're allowed to use. Everything else is, you know, sort of off the table. So even that now in the Power Platform, you can go into the connector into the DLP and say, this SharePoint site, fine. These SharePoint sites, no, no, no. So that's already coming. But even before that, if you generalize, you can still basically get alerted within a very short time of someone using that connector. And then you could have a flow that responds by disabling that app or removing the permissions on that app. And so then again, that's part of that challenge conversation. So instead of the default, just lock it down. I go, so what's the intent here? Well, the intent here is to mitigate risk of unauthorized use of an app. And I go, well, if within 20 minutes of someone doing that, your organization, have we met that intent? And in a highly regulated organization, the answer might be no. And if that ends, okay, fine, we'll use other means to do it. But in a lot of organizations that aren't regulated that just have that kind of security mindset, it's hard to argue against that. Because I've demonstrated that you can meet the intent, right? But you've done it in such a way that you've also still allowed for a hint of innovation, if someone does use the platform within the parameters defined. So the fact that, again, comes back to, if you have the data there to make decisions now, the whole, oh, the unknown is scary because it's unknown. That's off the table now. The unknown becomes known. It is there for you and it sort of challenges you to actually change where you think about this and how can we mitigate risk, but at the same time, perhaps realize opportunity. And I've got to say most of the organizations excluding the regulated ones that you speak of, most organizations, if you don't have a look at their mission statement, they'll say things like we empower our people or we're innovative and we're trying to build a culture of innovation. And so I always have a hard time reconciling the turn it all off. What does that actually mean? Yeah, right. And so we hold organizations to that because I say to many orgs, like in the absence of any other context, I'm coming in new, all I've got is your mission and value statement because that tells me how you're supposed to behave. And if you're then not behaving in accordance with that, I'm going to ask you why, right? And, you know, to understand because, yeah, that management team spent a lot of money and time and effort producing those things. And so they're there for a reason, right? You know, a couple of companies that I've worked with over the last 30 years that had that they spent a bunch of time and money and had beautiful brochure aware with these mission statements. And I was like, what the hell does this mean? Like all these fluffy things, like, what does it actually mean? What what's what's different about what I didn't knew and was doing yesterday? How does this empower me? Like, what am I doing? What are what am I not doing? I'm just I look at it and be like, wow, we got something to put on the website now. Great. Yeah. So I reckon that this is the way I look at it. It's a very useful tool in your arsenal because some organizations will legit spend a lot of time and effort cultivating a mission and communicating it and having all sorts of material that helps activate what that looks like. And if that's the case, it's very easy to have a conversation. I say, Christian, how can this approach that we're taking be compatible with the XYZ principle here? And and if we can't reconcile it and most people in organizations like that, right, we'll actually stop and go, OK, no, we need to sort of rethink this. And for that reason, every governance gig that we do, the first thing we do is we look at their corporate plan, their mission statement and actually make sure that whatever we come up with aligns to that objective. Then the other side, the ones that you talk about where like, it's just there on the wall and you're wondering, well, the glass half full version that is, it's a great tool because now you can basically interpret that any way you want and be disruptive and all sorts of ways because you can look on the wall and say, hang on a second. How is this anything to do with the innovative that I see at point two, sort of on the wall in the meeting room? And at that point, because it's never been communicated well, that's just a great grenade log that you've thrown in. So now they'll all have it. And then then you can watch the dissonance in people's minds as they try and were to submit their way out of or frame innovation in a way that still allows them to do what they want. Either way, lots of fun to be had in the corporate playground. Take something sideways. And somebody calls you on it. You'll be like, hey, all I was doing was following the new charter for the business. Yeah. Yeah. And you can do that with quality management too because usually there'll be a nice quality management objective. All of those frameworks, any management framework has broad objectives that drive the adoption of that framework. And so people don't realize that those objectives are where the power is, not the rules, because everyone understands the rules. And I'll use that as a, oh, you can't do that because of this. And if you then turn around and go, but the objective of this thing or the intent of it, which is stated here is this. So this is why as a completely separate topic, but maybe we'll just have this conversation in another time, but with along the lines of Viva and the acquisition of ally.io and Microsoft getting into the objectives, KPIs, that piece of it, the whole concept of which I know you're big on of having the shared understanding as an organization. And you as an individual understand, like this goes back to not understanding, being able to decipher what the charter is for the organization. I should be able to know from what I'm doing every, each and every day, how that rolls up, what I'm doing on a monthly, quarterly, annual basis, how it ties into what our team goals are, what our business unit goals are with the organization, which drives to that charter and how it aligns with all those things. If there's that basic disconnect, then you're not going to achieve the objectives that you're hoping to achieve or that you've, you know, you've not been able to articulate to your organization. What you think they should be working on will not be what they're actually working on. Yeah. And also, you know, and I'm not just going to like call out the IT department, they're just a convenient example. Departments that have that disconnect and just see themselves as risk mitigators end up not being seen as value creators, they get seen as cost centers. And as soon as you get seen as a cost center, that's when I remember saying this at a conference and then that you can always find someone cheaper to tell you no, because if you're a cost center, then what do you want to do? A rational organization wants to reduce its costs. And so that's when suddenly it's like, well, this service provider over here, maybe we'll sort of do this. So I reckon if you always as a service provider, and this is procurement and HR and all of them, every decision you make, you have to justify it against those objectives. Otherwise, it becomes a bit kind of navel gazing, and define bone in your own terms of reference, which is what HR departments are supposed to do or what IT departments are supposed to do. So that's a continual challenge. I think there's a recognition now that people are getting better at that, particularly the management folks within IT departments tend to have that view, at least in Australia. I can't speak for other orgs. And of course, the larger the yaw, the harder that gets because the bigger the size of the department. But look, I work for some very large organizations doing power platform stuff. And the relentless focus on alignment to objectives is actually really good. And I have one organization that had the mother of all KPIs. It was fantastic. If you want, if there's nothing else, if you want to become a value sort of creator, this is for the IT departments out there that are searching for their direction. Number of hours returned to the business. So a penny saved is a penny gain. There's some, I can't remember the exact phrase, but the point is this all, that's it. So this organization set a KPI that said we will return 200,000 hours of productivity to the business, right? That was kind of their goal. It was some big figure like that. And so what that meant was using COE, since we can track every time an app is used. And we also part of COE, I'm talking power platform again, by the way, there's an innovation backlog app, where instead of writing a big epic business case, you actually start by running through this app, and it literally has a database of pain points. And you can go, okay, so this app of mine, it's gonna, it's these are the pain point tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And then you click next and every pain point has some ROI KPIs associated with it. So when you get to the next page, it goes, okay, so how much time will you save for this pain point? And how much will you save for this one? It actually produces a quantifiable ROI figure for each app. And so if I now have data on every time that app is launched, I can literally give you a defensible report on literally what your power platform is doing. In this case, we obliterated the KPI. That was a whole departmental KPI, by the way, for the whole function of IT and the power platform team alone nailed it. You know, there's some like years ago, 20 plus years ago, working with rational software, so pre IBM acquisition, and the whole visual modeling space. And there were teams that were trying to do that. So not only going and doing the visual modeling and having the use cases and scenarios, and so having the notation, I know you're big in that world as well, but having the notation drawn out so that you have the businesses around it, but actually trying to go and put those quantifiable measures, the KPIs around each one of those was part of the process for some of these teams, which I thought is brilliant. And so not only could they, and the idea for those that aren't familiar with what rational software did and IBM acquired them, and I don't know what they're, I guess it's still out there. I've not seen it, you know, since I got into the Microsoft ecosystem in 2005, but was the idea is that you could go through and build these use cases using the notation, and it would actually generate code. So think about that. If you're, if you have that all modeled out with the notations of the, each of the individual use cases, the business activities, the scenarios that they tied together to go and do, and all of the KPIs and metrics around that and had a documented version of it, and then it would generate code, then you would know, hey, in theory, it should solve these business problems, solve these scenarios, provide this value, and then you can put a dollar value on those. Well, the, the power platform breaks. It was an interesting history to that. It actually started out as an idea we were doing with the client. So we captured, we created like a complexity evaluation. So you created power platforms. Is that what you're saying? No, no, no, no, no. It's a very collaborative thing. It's some, but it's a story of innovation because, so I originally came up with this complexity evaluation score just so that, and my intent was for a citizen user, I didn't want them to write a big business case and a requirement spec. I wanted to get them into using the tools and learning, but I still wanted to set expectations where, for example, a business user might go, oh, and my next requirement is I'm going to pull this data from SAP right into my app, and like instantly that just kills it, right? Because the governance around your ERP data. So I did that, and I actually gave it to the CAT team in power platform. And one of the folks in the CAT team took that as an input and took input from a bunch of other clients and actually recast it as an ideation kind of tool. So business users could pitch their ideas, put ROI, estimate the complexity, and then developers are able to then pick off which ones they want to do. So each, each app idea in the list said, this app has a complexity score of X and a ROI of Y. And so that way you could have one with a magnificent ROI, but the complexity score is insane. And it's like, no, this is actually go, go contract the team in, write a business case, write a decent specification, you know, do it the, the business as usual way because back to earlier part of the conversation, you know, good architecture is good architecture, irrespective of the platform. But on the other hand, if you saw one that's like, holy moly, this one is like a huge ROI, and it's not even that complex. This is a great time saver. We should be doing this one. Why do you even need a business case? You know, that's almost like, that's the essential aspect of innovation. So basically, yeah, this collaborative effort has resulted in this innovation backlog app. So I'm not claiming any because that sounds very familiar. What is in business school, I learned what we learned about and talked about in operations about the product kind of a product management focus, the house of quality, you know, the diagram like that chart. So that's the exact same thing. It's the design of that process that methodology is to identify things which could be of high value and low cost. And so, you know, even though you may have your it's, and that's one shift that has happened with, and it's not just about the cloud. It's about agile development in general, where organizations are becoming more, you know, product companies are becoming more data centric and looking at understanding what's the actual value of these activities, which could, you know, we as end users look at stuff as like, why would you go and focus on these things now without solving these other problems. And there may be a direct, you know, line to dollar value and, you know, number of seats sold and kind of all those different things of why they prioritize some of those things. So, you know, it just makes business sense, even with the backlash that there might be that something is not there yet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, and look, and the other part of so what stems from that. So that's kind of so imagine having that as so that's part of the base center of excellent starter kit, by the way. I always tailor it, but you could use the base one if you wanted to. So immediately the fringe benefits are, you know, users in traditionally, if they have an idea, they go to go to their friendly neighborhood business analysts and the two of them will do all sorts of work probably and need a budget just to write a business case and a whole bunch of requirements. And so it's almost like that kills innovation before it begins because it's not at that point, you know, the business case assumes you've got everything figured out to the point that you can elaborate everything. But that's not the way innovation works. Innovation. You might have a hunt. You want to test the idea. So that's where the kind of ideation piece comes in. But what then stems from that? So imagine that's your input funnel. You know, you got all these ideas coming in and your team might do some or even someone in the business goes, I know how to do that. I'll have a go at that one. You know, you could frame that different ways. But as a team as a power platform team, delivery team, you've got a couple of service offerings now, because you've got the build with you or build for you kind of option. They're two pathways. And the bill for you is, yeah, that's a complex one. We'll do that for you. You give us a job, you know, cost code. And this is how long we think we'll take and we'll manage it with a dedicated PM. But the build with you can be a slight dialer mental. And so we will help you work on it because, you know, our organization values skilling up people and we want you to become a super user. So and we'll teach you how to architect and things that you won't immediately consider. So that's kind of the delivery pathway sort of part of that. Both of those pathways still end up at a Power BI dashboard that tells you the ROI of those two apps. And now you can see that not only it's actually great for the app owners, too, because as an app owner, you might have said it's going to be awesome. The savings is going to be massive. And then you're going to have a look at the actual app usage. And it's like, oh, they're not using it even near as much as I sort of claim. So now that it's the business owner almost is incentivized to become an evangelist, you know, to actually realize the benefit that they said there was going to be. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, so yeah, all of this stuff, imagine, you know, I mean, you could have technically done this in SharePoint, but boy, it would have been hard work. Now it's trivially easy to do compared to compared to them. So so that's where, yeah, the Power Platform has really slotted nicely into there. And you could take that everything we just discussed, you could apply that to SharePoint based sites or bespoke based sites, you know, doesn't necessarily have to be Power Platform either. I just so I know that it's, I've heard from Microsoft people, I've heard from partners out in the the ecosystem about that that want help that want guidance on, you know, governance around the Power Platform. And what does that actually mean? And so there's, you know, so I run for, for, you know, my company for that point, I run the Community Champions program, which is like our MVP program. And so we've got requests out to a number of our champions that are working on some different content around that. And I just thought to say, I'm going to get Paul on here. It says, I'm, I'm sure he's doing something around, you know, that that space has some thoughts on governance of the space. So it's great to, to be able to kind of jump in and never thought of never, never short of thoughts Christian. No, no. But I actually have a referral to make to somebody. I was, I said, you know, you should, you should talk to Paul. This guy here, somebody who's outside of the Microsoft ecosystem, but is, you know, I think you would be very much akin with and, and potentially find some way to partner. But well, Paul, I know that we, so we talked all business and not the fun stuff, but we've gone kind of over time. But, you know, we, when are we getting the band back together? You know, I know things are starting to open up. You know, obviously, we were all watching the news and things change on a regular basis, but I, there are, I have plans to get down to your neck of the woods at once or twice next year. So I'll let you know, but I don't know if you're doing, have any plans, those things open up to travel this direction? Not as yet. And like, I never was much of, I didn't like traveling that much anyway. So particularly that's a long, you know, just, just the distance. It's a little bit disproportionate from, from Perth. So as I said, I started saying best place in the world right now, but before that, if you want to go anywhere, no. So no, but as far as the band, I did think of you, by the way, there was a certain about a year or maybe two years ago where Microsoft every so often, you know, they changed their license models. They did it for Power BI a few years ago and then they did it with Power Platform and annoyed everybody. I suddenly had, you know, you know, the Disturbs song, you know, they did the, the sounds of silence. You know, they covered the Simon and Garfunkel song and they did it. It's like the heavy metal band, but they did it kind of broody and atmospheric and it was a piano ballad. I suddenly was like, Oh, I got a call like Christian, we have to do the sounds of license. And the chorus was going to be on the sounds of license and someone's going to go, crap, what the hell? That was the sounds of license. So I thought that that was going to be the next, yeah, the next working on it type. So what was it? Do we have a band talking about? Like for people who don't know what we're talking about. So we had some years and years ago that the videos are out there. I think there's a couple thousand views of it or something, but, you know, for no real promotion around it, not no real promotion, no promotion around it. But it was after an event in where we were in Wellington for the first time. And it was, so it was on St. Patrick's Day. And there was a small group of non-drinkers that were like, what are we doing? And so like, we just screwed around, found a piano in the lobby of a hotel in Wellington, New Zealand, and recorded a song kind of poking fun at a SharePoint. And yeah, the rest is history. And then we did, it did another visit. It was Gary Jules Mad World. We called it Moss World, back when it was called Office SharePoint Server or something, Moss World. I'll put the link in the blog post for people as well. And then we got together a few years back. So like six years ago now, where I was out over in Perth visiting and we did, we cut the demos to the fake album, which was a lot of fun to do. I wrecked my voice that day, but... Yeah, singing the Yammer song, that was the only original composition. So folks, we did this one original composition. But when I say composition, it was basically an out of tune electric guitar. And I think I played three notes and just went, and then Christian was like, Yammer! And that was at the time where I think Yammer had been acquired. And so it was in every conversation from Microsoft, Yammer would come up. And so we were just having fun with that. And so, yeah, you shredded your voice, just screaming Yammer while I was just going, and that was it. That's all. That's right. Yeah. There's a lot of other people at that time in that era who lost their voice screaming about Yammer as well. But yeah, so I'm a fan, folks. So I use it every single day. But anyway, well, Paul, really appreciate the time. I know I need to, we also didn't talk about, I should mention the fact that so father, daughter, MVPs as well. Yeah. Oh, look, I'm going to make you indulge me for another minute on that. So on the citizen developer thing, where if people are skeptical of citizen developers, so five years ago, I taught my daughter how to use Power Apps because I thought it was teachable. I was using it and I'm not a real developer. And I was like, this is so easy. So I got her to learn it. She turned, she was a psychology student, had zero interest in IT. Every time I bought it up, she would just like ignore me. Now, fast forward, basically, she got really good at it, became an MVP and actually does a lot of advocacy for getting women into technology, particularly like young women. And so, yeah, at that point, I'm like, no, the citizen developer thing is real because, you know, my own offspring who had zero IT interests, know how, apart from social media, is now basically busting out apps. And there was one day a couple of years ago where we were talking about troubleshooting something and she was using all the right terms and she just went, oh my goodness, these words I'm saying, you know, I've become an adult. And she's teaching classes and mentoring people and doing a ton of stuff. Yeah, I have to say that I was going to let you know. So like my daughter actually, she's been becoming a Power BI expert and just building a ton of stuff. And she's actually working on building a product now and doing all this kind of stuff. And she says, dad, what's it take to become an MVP? And I'm like, all right, all right, let's line it up. Let me advise you on this. A lot of people I plug into a lot of things that you can go and do and learn and do. But yeah, it's very cool. That's a yet another topic there. I wish that more young people would realize that getting plugged into community early can be a huge benefit to your careers. Not just learning capability, but advancing your career beyond that of your peers. Yeah. No, I think probably three things I would say, at least on the MVP thing, I agree. So tap into communities number one, work out loud. Number two, so because if you get noticed, that that's kind of the key. But no, just going so with actually seeing what happened, the hypothesis after that was like, you know, okay, I could take someone and in a couple of months turn into really, really good power apps practitioners. So we actually took on trainees, additional trainees. So similar to Ashley, and they're now like senior members of the team. And so we have proven that the time it takes to get someone from zero to literally adding serious value is only a couple months. That was unheard of with SharePoint, right? But because you had to learn JavaScript, and we all know that that's a pain. So now the next stage for us as an organization is to is the hypothesis that the next bunch of trainees and the next one starts on Monday. They're going to be taught by the trainees that I taught and that virtuous cycle. And if we prove that that works well, then yeah, we have realized the vision of citizen developer and the opportunities that that affords for people that would typically go, oh, I don't know if it's for me, you know, I'm not smart enough to do that. Well, you know, guess what? We've got a whole bunch of people that we've proven that with a bit of mentoring, then yes, they can actually become very, very good. And there are so many different roles that within the scope of it as well. I mean, you have you have like business analysts, which are sometimes in IT, sometimes outside of IT, but you have that side of things, you know, the business process, but have some technical capability. And then you have the citizen developers all the way up in engineering. There's project management. There's product management. There are marketing roles that are more on the technical side of things. There's so many different options for people that to go in and get involved. But you have this this skill that you can develop and deliver value to your organization right away, even if you're in another role. So absolutely. And so maybe that'll be a conversation I wouldn't mind talking about, you know, if we did this again, because I have like just that kind of the way to deliver on these tools, you know, like what a project manager has to unlearn, what a BA has to unlearn, what an engineer type person has to unlearn. That would be an interesting topic because that's a great topic. Yeah, let's, we should roll that under the collab talk podcast and do something maybe next month or something. Sure. You'll be happy to not on your Saturday, but we can find something during the week. I know you got other client stuff going on too, but yeah, I'd actually rather it be on my Saturday to be honest. So it's all good. Yeah, it's all good. Well, Paul will really appreciate your time for folks that want to find out more about you, reach out and connect with you. What are the best ways to reach you? The usual, I suppose LinkedIn is probably the best place. I don't do many, I'm too old to do any of the socials apart from sort of LinkedIn. And I do have Twitter, but I'm not as active as I should be. So look, I would suggest LinkedIn or the seven sigma website, or there's a YouTube channel that I run with my daughter. And we have done various tutorials. We're not like particularly prolific on that. And that's just not by desire. That's just sheer time and doing things. But they're probably the big channels. I would recommend the website for my two books, but it's down right now. So, but if you go to Amazon, you can search for the a couple of books that I've written, their business books have nothing to do with technology. Yeah, highly recommend. I'll have all the links out on the book, the planet blog as well for folks to find. So you can you'll call home. So you can find it out at buckleyplanet.com. All the links to all his stuff. I'll have it all out there as well. So awesome. Really appreciate the time. We'll talk to you soon. Okay.