Mar 26, 2024
Everyone talks about digital transformation, but it seems like no one really explains what it means... until now. In today's episode, Rob and Justin dive deep to cut through the buzzwords and lay out the reality. They're tackling why digital transformation isn't about making huge, instant changes but rather about the smart, subtle tweaks in areas that usually get ignored but badly need a digital lift. They dive into how leveraging tools like the Power Platform can spark significant improvements, showing that it's the small changes that can really boost efficiency and smooth out your workflow.
Ever found yourself wondering how to translate all the chatter about digital evolution into actionable steps? That's exactly what Rob and Justin are unpacking. They're guiding you through how minor, yet clever adjustments can transform your processes. It's all about enhancing the routine, one step at a time.
And, as always, if you enjoyed the episode, be sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform to help new listeners find us.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Rob Collie (00:00):
Hello, friends. In today's episode, Justin and I demystify what is
meant by the phrase digital transformation. Phrases like that are
one of my least favorite things. Why do I say that? Well, these are
phrases that get used a lot. They cast a big shadow. You encounter
them almost anywhere you go. That's fine by itself. But in the case
of digital transformation, that massive shadow is multiplied by no
one understanding what it actually means.
(00:30):
Now earlier in my career, I used to be really intimidated by things
like this. Everyone seems to know what this means because they're
using it all the time. I don't know what it means, so should I just
pretend and play along like everyone else? But at some point, many
years ago, I had this moment where I realized that the Emperor has
no clothes. It almost never has clothes. Now when I encounter
phrases like this, instead of being like paralyzed or intimidated,
I instead start working in my own definition and this process takes
time. I've been picking apart and stewing on the definition of
digital transformation now for probably the better part of a year
plus. Somewhere along the way in that process, I realized that we
at P3 are doing quite a bit of digital transformation work, I just
hadn't realized it yet because I didn't have a good enough
definition.
(01:18):
Lately, I've been noticing that my definition for digital
transformation has reached a steady state. It's not changing over
time anymore, which tends to be my signal that I've arrived at a
definition that works. Now seemed like a good time to sit down and
compare notes with Justin, who's been following his own parallel
process of arriving at a definition. I'm very pleased with where we
landed. A practical and specific definition that can be reduced to
practice with an almost paint-by-numbers type of
approach.
(01:47):
If you asked someone for a definition of something like digital
transformation, and by the time they're done giving you their
definition, you can't practically boil that down to what it means
for you, that's not a problem with you, that's a problem with the
definition. A lot of times, people's definitions for terms like
this are almost like deliberately vague, as a means of projecting
power, as a means of actually controlling you. You'll get a lot of
definitions that are engineered to sound smart, engineered to sound
authoritative, but not engineered to provide anything resembling
clarity. Because if you sound smart, and you sound authoritative
but you leave your audience hungry, you create a feeling of
dependency. Folks, I just think that's yucky. That's just
gross.
(02:35):
To show you what I mean, I just ran the Google search, "What does
digital transformation mean?" The very top hit,
enterprisersproject.com, defines digital transformation as "the
integration of digital technology into all areas of a business
resulting in fundamental changes to help businesses operate in how
they deliver value to customers." Did that clear it up? Nope.
Boiling that one down, it sounds a lot like you should use
computers and use them to make changes. But it sounds smart, sounds
authoritative.
(03:06):
Here's the second result from our old favorite, McKinsey. McKinsey
defines digital transformation as "the process of developing
organizational and technology based capabilities that allow a
company to continuously improve its customer experience and lower
its unit costs, and over time sustain a competitive advantage." All
right, so that one sounds like McKinsey is almost starting with
that original definition and adding additional value to it. They're
saying use computers to improve, and to make money, and to compete.
If you have $1 million to spend, you can get advice like
that.
(03:43):
All right, with those two definitions, we don't even need an
episode. We can just skip it? Because everyone knows exactly what
they're talking about. These are the top two hits on Google, folks.
Useless. Part of the reason these definitions are useless, again,
is because they're designed to be useless. But I also think though,
that a lot of times you hear definitions like this is because the
people writing them actually cannot boil them down. By the time you
come up with a truly useful definition, or a framework, or a guide
for understanding a topic like this, it almost by its definition,
it's not going to sound nearly as sexy, nearly as smart. It's going
to sound relatively simple, mundane. But those are the valuable
definitions, the ones that we can actually apply, that make a
difference in how we actually view our own business.
(04:29):
That's what we set out to do in this episode. I think we succeeded,
came up with a very practical, applicable definition that you'll
never find on McKinsey's website. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?
Speaker 4 (04:46):
This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast, with your host, Rob
Collie, and your cohost, Justin Mannhardt. Find out what the
experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to
p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human
element.
Rob Collie (05:12):
Justin, one of the things that we really like to do, I really like
to do, I think you do as well, is to take a phrase or topic, and
demystify it. Especially phrases that you hear repeated over, and
over, and over again, and everyone has to pretend that they
understand what they mean. But even when they do, they often have
very different pictures in their heads.
(05:33):
One that I think is due for a treatment, and we've hinted at it
once before on this podcast but not with any depth, is digital
transformation. What does it mean?
Justin Mannhardt (05:45):
What does it mean, what does it not mean, all parts in
between.
Rob Collie (05:50):
Starting with the places where I hear it. I often hear it in the
context of this is something that's already done. The big talking
head analysts at places like Gartner-
Justin Mannhardt (06:00):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (06:00):
Will talk about it like it's in the rearview mirror. "The shift to
digital, the pivot to digital has forced the following things," so
has forced, it's a past tense thing. Which further underlines the
idea that well, if it's already happened, clearly everyone knows
what it means. They don't stop to define it, they're just tossing
that aside as a means of getting to the next point. I find that to
be one of the most troubling habits of the talking heads.
(06:28):
The first few times I encountered this phrase, I didn't really know
what it meant. I imagined that it meant switching to ecommerce from
brick-and-mortar.
Justin Mannhardt (06:37):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (06:37):
I didn't even realize that that was the impression I had, it was
just this vague feeling in the back of my head.
Justin Mannhardt (06:42):
The word digital, I'm just thinking about this now because a lot of
times, you'll look at one of these diagrams, it's like, "Your
digital transformation wheel includes all these things." You'll see
something like, "Move to the cloud." I'm like, "Okay, were the
servers with the software, was that software analog or
something?"
Rob Collie (06:59):
Yeah, we've been digital for a long time, right?
Justin Mannhardt (07:01):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (07:01):
Most broadly defined, you could say that the digital transformation
really got going with the adoption of the PC.
Justin Mannhardt (07:09):
Right.
Rob Collie (07:10):
That was when digital transformation started. In the sense that it
started in the 1980s, maybe it is something worth talking about
somewhat in the rearview mirror, but that's not what they mean.
They don't mean the adoption of the PC.
Justin Mannhardt (07:23):
No. But it's interesting, when you think about the timeline of
technology evolution. People say, "Oh, you described it as past
tense." Digital transformation has occurred in en masse in market.
Now today, it's like AI is here, en masse in market. But the pace
at which new things are coming out, what's really happening is just
the long tail is longer back to where companies were at in this
journey. It's not like the entire industrial complex has been
collectively moving to the modern current state across the board.
There's companies that are still running SQL 2000, that's their
production world still. This isn't something that's
happened.
Rob Collie (08:09):
I think that the big talking head analysts often tend to really
only talk about the most elite sub-strata of even their own
clients. When they talk about this as something that's completely
done, even most of Gartner's paying clients, I would suspect,
aren't anywhere close to done. But we still haven't really started
talking about what it actually means.
(08:32):
Let's say it is not the switch from paper and pencil systems to
electronic line-of-business systems. Not only do we have the PC,
and that's been long since mainstreamed, the notion of
line-of-business software, server based software, whether cloud or
otherwise, line-of-business software is also I think incredibly
well entrenched. We're done with having key business systems
running in a manual format. That's long since rearview. That also
isn't what they mean by digital transformation.
(09:07):
Of course, both of those are digital and they were huge
transformations, but that's not the digital transformation we're
talking about. It's anything that's happened after that.
Justin Mannhardt (09:15):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (09:16):
It's a lot harder to pin down the things that happened after
that.
Justin Mannhardt (09:20):
In general, I agree with you because the big blocks, software, the
availability of the cloud, not having intensive paper process in
most companies, that's largely been accomplished. To different
levels, of course. Then, what's left? What's the definition? What
are we trying to do?
Rob Collie (09:41):
Well, if you think of the line-of-business application and the PC,
the PC interfaces with all the line-of-business apps. I would say
that, and even this is not 100% true, but I would say that the
conversion to digital systems is complete, or complete-ish.
Justin Mannhardt (09:59):
Okay.
Rob Collie (09:59):
When you look at your business as individual silos.
Justin Mannhardt (10:03):
Say more. You've got a digital environment for finance, digital
environment for sales, is that what you mean?
Rob Collie (10:09):
Yeah. Core workflows have largely been digital for a while. All the
workflows that take place between systems, or the workflows that
take place adjacent to a system, those are the things that we're
talking about when we talk about digital transformation, going
after those workflows.
(10:30):
Everything we've been doing in the world of business software since
at least the 1980s has been digital transformation.
Justin Mannhardt (10:38):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (10:39):
But our digital transformation, we're really talking about at least
the third chapter. It's not chapter one or two. It's like the next
frontier, identifying and going after a new class of workflows that
would benefit from essentially software support.
Justin Mannhardt (10:56):
Right.
Rob Collie (10:56):
Okay. Now because almost by definition, just by subtraction ...
We're saying, "Look, we've got the PC, we've got the
line-of-business systems that handle the core workflows within a
silo. What's left?" Well, it's almost like a perfect mathematical
proof. What's left is the stuff between and outside.
(11:14):
Given that everyone's mix of line-of-business systems is, I like to
say, best of breed, meaning random. It's whatever we decided at the
time. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Legacy.
Justin Mannhardt (11:25):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (11:26):
You're never going to have anything off-the-shelf that helps you
solve the workflows. The middleware problem between your systems is
always going to be a custom solution.
(11:38):
We should give examples of these. When I said outside or adjacent
to, there's even workflows that they're not really between systems,
they're just the offline portion of working with the system. I'm
thinking about a budgeting process, for instance. The world's first
budgeting systems were mostly there to record your budget that you
enter into it. As those budgeting systems have gotten better,
they've included more and more of the human workflow that goes into
creating, and evaluating, and kicking the tires before it's
finalized. Those offline human workflows, getting more and more
structured about them, can make a huge difference.
Justin Mannhardt (12:19):
Not just structured, Rob, more tightly integrated with the adjacent
system itself. I like that adjacency, because if you have a
financial system where your budget or your forecast lives, there's
a martialing of activity, analysis, input. Then you say, "Okay, we
need to get it look like this," and then we put it in the thing.
What happens in that processes, you get all sorts of scattered
iterations of ideas and it gets loose. But if you could have all
that iteration tight, the final submission is already handled or
much easier.
Rob Collie (12:51):
Yeah. Sticking with the budgeting example for a moment, it still
echoes one of the themes I mentioned for the between systems, the
between silos case. Which is that one-size-fits-all systems,
off-the-shelf systems, they really struggle to address all the
nuances of your particular business. It's very, very difficult. The
more, and more, and more you try to get the offline processes, the
human processes brought into the digital workflow, the more an
off-the-shelf software package is going to struggle. It's getting
further and further away from the safety of the core of the
task.
(13:28):
This is why the Power Platform approach to budgeting and planning
is often, in fact almost always, a more effective, in terms of
cost-effective, time effective, results effective. The core
libraries for doing all of the things that you need to do are
basically already there and it's inherently designed to be
customizable.
Justin Mannhardt (13:48):
And very nimble. Even the big players in FP&A software, they're
not that great, in our opinion, at the end of the day. But the
price points just exclude anybody that's not a very sizeable,
formidable company. You're not looking to spend that kind of money
if you're even a few hundred million a year type operation. You're
just not going to sign up to that agreement. You are left with a
middleware type of a problem, that you're either solving with
spreadsheets, pen and paper, or something else. Our platform can
slide right in there.
Rob Collie (14:26):
Of course, there is a huge advantage to performing a "digital
transformation" on a process like that because the human, offline,
pen and paper, sending random emails, getting answers, tracking
them, it's incredibly tedious, it's incredibly error-prone. Just
super, super slow. It's not like you can perform many iterations.
You're not even really going to be able to pull off one iteration
and you call it good. But you're just going to miss so much. The
budget could have been so much better. If you've got a bad budget,
of course you're going to pay for that later.
(14:58):
That's the adjacent case. Let's talk about the between a little bit
as well. What's an example of a workflow that would span across
different line-of-business systems but require a human being
essentially, or humans, to essentially carry the buckets of water
between those different pipes?
Justin Mannhardt (15:18):
We'll make up a company today, Rob, we'll start a new company and
it's going to be called I Manufacture Things, Inc. Hey. At I
Manufacture Things, Inc., I've got a sales team.
Rob Collie (15:28):
Do we make things other than ink?
Justin Mannhardt (15:30):
No, that's incorporated.
Rob Collie (15:32):
Oh, okay.
Justin Mannhardt (15:32):
We just make things.
Rob Collie (15:34):
Can't help it. Can we be We Manufacture Things Ink, Inc.?
Justin Mannhardt (15:38):
Sure.
Rob Collie (15:39):
All right. But anyway, we manufacture things.
Justin Mannhardt (15:41):
There you go. We've got a sales team and they're using a CRM
system, such as Salesforce, or HubSpot, or whatever. They're out
there, they're doing quotes, they're tracking opportunities, and
eventually someone says, "Yeah, I'd love to buy a palette of ink,"
or whatever. Our company, we're not using the CRM to deal with the
production and fulfillment of that order. Okay, so now there's this
process where my order form, let's not use any paper in this
example, it's still digital but it lands as a PDF form in someone's
email inbox that says, "Hey, Customer Service Rep, here's an
order." Oh, okay. Now I'm keying said order into our production
system that says, "Go manufacture this thing." Now we need to ship
the thing out somewhere, and now we're in our logistics
system.
(16:33):
There's all these little hops between systems. Which technology has
become more open, and sure there's things like APIs and code based
ways to integrate them, but that's not in range for a lot of
companies. That's an example of where you could stitch in these
little Power Platform type solutions to just, "Hey, let's map the
relevant fields and information from the CRM into the order
management system." If there's some blanks that need to get filled
in, that's okay. Maybe I'm just starting from a queue of new orders
right in the system, and I'm maybe adding three or four pieces to
that puzzle instead of all of it.
Rob Collie (17:12):
Okay. I want to make a global note here. Note that we're talking
about this broad topic, digital transformation. We're already way
down into very detailed, specific use cases. In my opinion, that's
what digital transformation is, it's a collection of all of these
individual use cases where things can get faster, more efficient,
more accurate. It is the sum of many small things. Each one of them
might have tremendous impact. This is the way.
(17:46):
In this particular example, I've been describing the Power Platform
as the world's best middleware for a while now. Even Power BI is
middleware. It's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful capability is that
it can simultaneously ingest data from multiple different
line-of-business silos that have never once talked to each other.
The only place that they meet is in a Power BI semantic
model.
Justin Mannhardt (18:10):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (18:10):
And they play a symphony together that Power BI makes them play.
They still have never seen each other, but Power BI is what bridges
the gap. Now, Power BI is read-only by itself, it doesn't make
changes to any systems.
(18:25):
In this particular case, it sounds like Power App's and Power
Automate's music. Let's just get really tangible here. I know that
it's a very specific, but it's a fictional example. But lots of
people have almost exactly this problem.
Justin Mannhardt (18:39):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (18:39):
Just talk me through what a solution to that particular problem
might look like if we implemented it in the Power Platform. How
much work, how much elapsed time do you think it would take? Let's
dig into this one a little bit.
Justin Mannhardt (18:51):
If what I want to do is, when we receive an order or close a deal
in our CRM, I want that to move some data to another system, let's
just say that's assumed. Power Automate can solve this need.
Obviously there's a lot of detail, you can look some things up
online, or you can email robandjustin@p3adaptive.com and we can
trade some ideas here. But there are tons of out-of-the-box
connectors, and in those connectors they have what's called a
trigger. I could say, "When this happens in Salesforce," for
example, "I want to start building a flow." I can say, "Okay, I
want these fields, and I want to write them from Salesforce to this
destination." Maybe that destination's a database, maybe that
destination is another system that Power Automate supports that you
can write to.
(19:37):
It could be just this simple mapping exercise. When this happens
over here, grab this data, and create a new record over here in
this system.
Rob Collie (19:46):
Okay. A trigger in this case would look something like, "When a
record in Salesforce is marked as a win," we've signed a deal,
someone wants to buy a palette of whatever. Then automatically, it
wakes up, looks at the record in question that the data associated
with the sales win in Salesforce, grabs certain fields out of the
Salesforce record, certain pieces of information. Let's keep it
simple for a moment, and just pushes them into a simple SQL
database or something, that could be stood up in minutes. We don't
have to spend a lot of time. Or maybe, we just drop it into
OneLake.
Justin Mannhardt (20:23):
Lots of options there. I think this is a nice little simple
example, because when you talk about Power BI, that's a very
tangible apparatus. These are the things you set up, and you never
really go ... You monitor it of course, but you never really go
engage with it. You put the glue in place, and it's magic and it's
cool. That's a simple version.
(20:44):
But sometimes, the data coming from its source is incomplete
relative to what it's destination requires to take the next action.
In this type of scenario you could either say, "Well okay, once it
gets over there, we're just in that system, maybe we're adding to
it." But this is where you might insert a Power App into the
process. Win a deal in Salesforce that triggers, grab these fields.
Let's go ahead and write it over to Dataverse, this is a back end
of a Power App, for example. Or a database, or SharePoint, who
knows. It depends on what makes sense.
(21:18):
Now we've got a Power App that maybe has a little work cue that
says, "Hey, Rob, you've got new orders." You're either approving
them, or you're annotating them with additional information. You're
doing the human process, like you were describing before, maybe
ensuring some hygiene, completeness, whatever. Then you do
something in Power App that says, "Okay, go ahead and kick this
down the line from here."
Rob Collie (21:40):
Yeah. Here's an example. In the CRM system where the sale is being
executed, there's probably an address for this customer that is
associated with that account, especially if we've done business
with them before. But this customer might have many different
physical locations. A palette of stuff showing up at the wrong
physical location would be a real problem.
Justin Mannhardt (22:06):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (22:08):
Even just a sanity check Power App that hits the sales rep back,
shows up in their inbox or something, shows up in Teams, somehow
there's a cue for them to process these things, where they need to
just glance at the order and validate that the shipping address is
the right one.
Justin Mannhardt (22:28):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (22:28):
Even if that's all it is, that's the only additional piece of
information is yes, no, that's the right address.
Justin Mannhardt (22:34):
Yeah. Or sometimes there's a material that is sold is related to a
bill of materials to produce. Maybe there's some choices that need
to get made in the manufacturing process, such as what specific raw
materials are we going to use for this order? Which machine are we
going to produce it on this week? Maybe you're just adding the
execution instructions.
Rob Collie (22:59):
This is interesting because you could stop yourself at this moment
and go, "Wait a second. Shouldn't those questions be encoded and
implemented into the CRM?" The answer is of course, they could be.
But your CRM might not be a nimble place to make those sorts of
changes.
Justin Mannhardt (23:20):
That's right.
Rob Collie (23:22):
It's also a dangerous thing to be customizing.
Justin Mannhardt (23:24):
Yes.
Rob Collie (23:25):
There's a lot of validation and testing that's required. There's a
reason why modifying and writing custom code into one's CRM doesn't
happen all that frequently. Whereas this process you're describing
is relatively safe, by comparison. It doesn't rock the boat. It's
between. Forcing these sorts of modifications and customizations
into the individual silo line-of-business applications, if that
were so feasible, that would already be happening.
Justin Mannhardt (23:55):
I've worked for companies like this, I've engaged with companies in
my consulting career like this, where they have done that. They
said, "We've got the talent in-house, so we're going to customize
this thing." Then you get into a conversation of, "We'd like to
upgrade to the newer version." They realized, "Oh, we
can't."
Rob Collie (24:18):
Yeah. "It'll break out customizations," yes.
Justin Mannhardt (24:20):
Or sometimes, the programming language that the customizations are
done in is not the same programming language in the newer version.
While it's possible, if you have the resources, the time, and the
money, it becomes a heavier lift. It begs the question,
why?
Rob Collie (24:36):
I was describing the heavy lift being that the original
line-of-business system might be resistant to change, resistant to
the customizations that you want to implement. You're describing it
as also, even if you do perform those customizations, the next
major software upgrade is going to be a problem. That rings true
for me. I remember the object model in Office-
Justin Mannhardt (24:59):
Oh, yeah.
Rob Collie (25:00):
All the VBA solutions that were out there, being incredibly
paralyzing in terms of the things we could do with the product,
because if you broke people's macros, they wouldn't upgrade to the
new version of Office.
Justin Mannhardt (25:09):
Yeah, been there. Yeah.
Rob Collie (25:12):
I promise you that, at Microsoft, we took that problem and
approached it with a level of discipline that it was probably 10
times greater than the average line-of-business software vendor.
Because most line-of-business software vendors see themselves as
platform vendors. They want to be considered like that, but they
don't want to pay the price of it. So that's good.
(25:30):
But then, the other thing is is if you built it into the
line-of-business system, then inherently you're saying, "Okay,
whatever that extra logic is, then it's up to that line-of-business
system to then push those records across the wire." The new
information has to go from the CRM to the other system. That kind
of customization, both ends of the process are going to be very
non-cooperative with this. This is another reason why doing this in
a lightweight, nimble, intermediate layer provides a shock absorber
to the system.
Justin Mannhardt (26:08):
I like that analogy.
Rob Collie (26:09):
It's pretty easy for Power Automate, all it's doing is pushing a
handful of doing to something and that other something is going to
take care of all the validation, all of the retry. Validation with
human beings, but also the logging in to the other system and all
of that. Coding all of that into your CRM is almost a non-starter.
This is why the between workflows have remained so
non-digitized.
Justin Mannhardt (26:42):
Yeah. There's also a lot of tedium should be in play here, too. You
have a written process, you look at your SOP documents and you say,
"Oh, when this happens, Jan sends an email to Rob." Okay, well we
could probably just get the Power Automate to send the email to
Rob, if that what needs to happen.
(26:59):
An example of this is something I built for myself at P3. When a
potential new customer reaches out to us, and they want to meet
with us and just chat, I wanted a process that reminded myself to
go check out who that company is, understand who I'm going to talk.
I just had a trigger that said, "When a meeting gets scheduled from
this arena, just create a task for me to remember to do this before
the meeting." Even little things like that, that are just
personally useful, have been really beneficial as well.
(27:33):
It's much easier to say well yeah, dashboards, charts, graphs,
cool. Or even fabric, even though that needs some demystifying
still. This middleware, it's invisible, there's so many options.
There's 100,000 little improvements you could make with
it.
Rob Collie (27:48):
The world has spent a long time coming around to why dashboards
could be valuable.
Justin Mannhardt (27:55):
They still are.
Rob Collie (27:56):
Yes. When you say the word dashboards and you show that work
product, even in the abstract to someone, the communication of what
the value is benefiting from all of that history of the world
waking up to the value of dashboards. Honestly, it wasn't that
clear 15 years ago. It wasn't clear to people, most people anyway,
why they needed them, why they were better than just running the
reports out of each line-of-business system. But because it's such
an inherently visible work product, it is a lot easier, I'm going
to use the word, it's a lot easier to visualize what the impact
will be, what it does for you. Whereas these other workflows, until
you know that they're improvable, this is why digital
transformation is so hard to understand because it is really
talking about spaces where it's hard to visualize software helping
because it's never been able to help.
(28:53):
Let's go back to this example where the sale happens in the CRM
system. Some information just automatically gets dropped in a data
store, off to the side for the moment. There's potentially some
Power App clarification. There are human inputs that are required
here and you still want a human being to provide those.
Justin Mannhardt (29:16):
I want to point out here too, it's easy to get into a situation
where that data store is simply being read by a report, even a
Power BI report. But if the human's going to say, "Yes, no," or add
to it, the Power App is just a way better piece to put
there.
Rob Collie (29:32):
Yeah. Let's have this example be like an example that we would look
at and smile, be proud of. The Power App is involved. Then when the
human interaction is done, they press okay or approve in the Power
App. Take me to the next step.
Justin Mannhardt (29:49):
Well ideally, we are pushing data and information into the next
system or workflow.
Rob Collie (29:57):
This is a two silo problem. We have the CRM system and then we have
the manufacturing, work order and shipment system, the fulfillment
system.
Justin Mannhardt (30:06):
The WMS.
Rob Collie (30:08):
Is that what that is?
Justin Mannhardt (30:08):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (30:09):
Okay. We've already covered the first silo. We've gotten the human
interaction. Now it's time to send it on to the second silo. How
does that work?
Justin Mannhardt (30:20):
This just comes down to what the point of integration is in the
second silo. We could be inserting records into a SQL database, we
could be making a post request to an API endpoint. In Power
Automate, most of these things are WISIWIG in nature. There is an
open code interface if you need to get to that and want to do that,
need it. But usually, it's just mapping. You find your destination
and it says, "Oh, here's the fields to map to." You say, "Okay,"
you just drag and drop. It just depends on what your destination
system is, but you're just creating a target in your workflow, and
the data goes.
Rob Collie (30:55):
The way I like to look at this is that, even though each
line-of-business silo system, they're never really built to talk to
each other.
Justin Mannhardt (31:04):
Right, they need a translator.
Rob Collie (31:05):
Yeah. The translator and the shock absorber. But at the same time,
it's not hard to get the information you want out of one system,
and it's not hard to write the information you need into another.
But when you try to wire them directly through to each other-
Justin Mannhardt (31:23):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (31:23):
That is actually really difficult. You need this referee in the
middle, that's able to change gears, like the ambassador between
the two systems. When you think about a translator system, an
ambassador system, a shock absorber, whatever you want to call it,
whatever metaphor you want, you can also imagine an incredibly
expensive, elaborate piece of custom software that's being written
to do that. That's not what we're talking about.
Justin Mannhardt (31:47):
No.
Rob Collie (31:48):
Let's recap. Trigger fires in CRM system, some data gets slurped
out related to that sale, dropped in an intermediate location that
then powers a Power App. Power App is able to read that
information, it knows who to reach back to to get the
clarification, the approval, et cetera. It might be multiple people
that need to provide some input.
Justin Mannhardt (32:09):
It could be a whole workflow that lives right there.
Rob Collie (32:12):
But eventually at the end of that workflow, in this case we'll just
assume it's one step, one human being, the sales rep just needs to
sign off, then the Power App's job is done. That's the human
interaction part. Now we're back to Power Automate,
correct?
Justin Mannhardt (32:24):
That's right.
Rob Collie (32:25):
Power Automate will notice there's another trigger that the Power
App is done with its part, the approval button was pressed.
Justin Mannhardt (32:31):
Clicked, yeah.
Rob Collie (32:33):
Then it turns around, and it knows, because again we wire it up ...
It sounds like we might be lucky, it's just drag and drop, one time
development. But if it's not, it's probably not that much code, to
go inject the new work order into the WMS system?
Justin Mannhardt (32:52):
Yeah, it's the WMS, warehouse management system.
Rob Collie (32:53):
Let's call that the end of the story for this one integration.
Let's say things go incredibly well in this project. We don't
really encounter any hiccups. Best case scenario, how long on the
calendar would it take for us to wire something like this
up?
Justin Mannhardt (33:12):
Yeah, best case scenario this is something that gets done inside of
a week.
Rob Collie (33:15):
That's the difference.
Justin Mannhardt (33:16):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (33:18):
All right. Worst case scenario, both of these systems are more
stubborn than usual, the connectors aren't built into the system,
and they still have some relatively rudimentary ways of data
access, but it's nothing WISIWIG off-the-shelf. We just get unlucky
with these two stubborn line-of-business systems. How bad can that
be?
Justin Mannhardt (33:37):
Well, instead of being inside of a week, maybe it's weeks, like two
or three. The only reason that gets extended would be okay, instead
of pure WISIWIG drag and drop, maybe we are having to do some light
handling of adjacent array. But there's tools for that. You can
say, "Parse this into fields so I can now drag and drop it." Maybe
instead of our Power Automate workflow having three, four steps,
maybe there's 10. Some of those steps have a little bit more
involvement. Maybe there's some time because we got to troubleshoot
a little bit more and make sure we've got it all right. But I think
the overall point here is these are relatively light touch on the
calendar.
Rob Collie (34:18):
I had a job in college that I've never brought up on this show.
Justin Mannhardt (34:23):
Ooh.
Rob Collie (34:23):
I was obsessed about this workflow for nearly a whole decade
afterwards. Where I was working for a construction company, and
there's this thing in the construction industry that I'm sure is
still a thing, and it's called the submittals process. Where it
turns out, when you're going to build a building, there's an
ingredients list for a building. You were talking about different
material options for manufacturing. So we're going to make a brick
exterior. Okay, what kind of brick? There are many different
colors, kinds, textures, levels of quality. Literally, the owner of
the building, the person paying to have the building built, that
owner and their architect, and sometimes their structural
engineers, are going to want to hold a physical brick in their
hand.
Justin Mannhardt (35:05):
Right.
Rob Collie (35:06):
This is the brick that you are going to use. They want to inspect
it with their eyes, whatever, they want to feel ... Maybe even run
tests on it.
Justin Mannhardt (35:14):
Smack it with a hammer.
Rob Collie (35:16):
Right. Then, when you build the building, you better use that brick
because they're holding onto the brick, the sample, the reference
brick. You think about the number of ingredients that goes into
building a building, and the building in question that I was
working on helping out with this process was the new chemistry
building at Vanderbilt University. It was not just a regular
building, it had all kinds of specialized hardware, and exhaust,
and crazy stuff that wouldn't be in a normal building.
(35:44):
There's this long list of materials that need to have submittals
produced for them, samples. The requests all go to a million
different vendors. You have to ask the subcontractor, the plumbing
contractor, what pipe they plan to use. You find out what pipe they
plan to use and then you say, "Okay, where do I get a sample of
that pipe?" Sometimes you have to send the request for the sample
to the pipe manufacturer, or something the subcontracting, the
plumber, people will do it for you. Ah! It's awful.
(36:14):
I was brought in to just be the human shock absorber in this
process. I was constantly taking information from one format,
copying and pasting it, if I was lucky. Usually, re-hand entering
into another one. I have to do this multiple times. I have to do
this on the outgoing request, and then the incoming materials
coming back. Ugh, and then the shipping labels and everything. It
was just they brought me in because they had their assistant
project manager for the construction company, the general
contractor, on this site. All of this was having to go through him.
It turns out, he had another job which was called build the
building.
Justin Mannhardt (36:54):
Just a minor, little job.
Rob Collie (36:56):
Yeah. The job of push the samples around was a fine thing to
subcontract to a college student. I swear, I did 40 hours a week on
that for a whole summer, and then part-time for the next two years.
That's all I did.
Justin Mannhardt (37:13):
Make note, students. If you take an internship and you end up like
Rob, learn how to do Power Automate stuff and use that for your
internship.
Rob Collie (37:22):
By the way, we already had Lotus Notes with a tremendous amount of
customized Lotus Note template for this process.
Justin Mannhardt (37:30):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (37:30):
But all that really was was just another line-of-business system
that didn't talk to anything. It spit out paper is what it did, it
spit out printed slips that announced, "This is your
brick."
Justin Mannhardt (37:42):
Congratulations.
Rob Collie (37:44):
That would be a really, really challenging digital transformation
process today, because not only is it cross system, it's also cross
companies. But I'm sure that, if we looked at that process today,
we would find things that could be optimized.
Justin Mannhardt (37:56):
Oh, yeah. Your example reminded me of a really important
opportunity in the construction industry or lots of trades. You're
talking about people that are out in the field, on job sites, on
location, they're not sitting in offices at workstations. All of
these things we're talking about, especially these Power App
interfaces, can be optimized for mobile. Instead of, "Oh, I'm going
to write this down so when I get back to my home office," I can put
something on the smartphone. Even if you're not picking from a list
of material SKUs or whatever, you can say, "Hey, Rob needs a
brick."
(38:36):
Now this goes back to your central office, and it's into a work
queue, and another screen in the Power App, then they can go
navigate the vendors and all that sort of stuff, too. That's a
great example of where you can just put a little spice on
it.
Rob Collie (38:50):
I said that was the only thing I did in that job, that's not true.
I had other jobs. One of them was the plumbing contractor was
deemed to be running well behind schedule, they were not installing
pipe fast enough, pipe and duct work. They assigned me, the
construction company assigned me the job of going out there,
walking through the building and seeing how much had been
installed, linear feet of various materials, and writing it down. I
was terrible at this. It's not a good fit for me at any age, but at
age 20, I was just constantly under-reporting how much work they'd
actually done and getting them in trouble.
Justin Mannhardt (39:32):
This does not sound like a good use of Rob.
Rob Collie (39:34):
Eventually, everyone bought me the little thing that wheels along
on the ground and counts distance. What I would do is I'd be
looking overhead at these copper pipes that were hanging from the
ceiling, and I'd just stand beneath one end of them and walk across
the building, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. But then, what
would I do? I would write it down. I'd write down a number. What
floor am I on? What side of the building am I on? Which pipes am I
looking at? "Oh yeah, 150 linear feet." By the way, have I already
counted those pipes? Did I count those pipes last week? I don't
know.
Justin Mannhardt (40:11):
There's errors in the world that have Rob Collie's fingerprints on
them. There's a building somewhere that's had some pretty serious
issues over the years and it's Rob's fault.
Rob Collie (40:21):
The plumbing contractor had a pretty good sense of humor about it.
They knew I was a youngster. Anyway, really just another example of
something that could be digitally transformed today and it doesn't
have to be difficult.
(40:33):
This is not something that's a global, let's go digitally transform
the whole company all at once. You can pick and choose some high
value examples. And decide if that's a sufficient win for you, you
might be encouraged to do it elsewhere. There's no thou shalt do
all of these things, there's nothing like that. You get to choose
where your cost benefit curve lies. But just even knowing that this
is possible I think and what it entails. Demystifying ... The
process we just walked through, with today's technology, is not
difficult. We're talking, as you said, within a week to several
weeks on the worst case end. You do realize a bunch of benefits
from that.
Justin Mannhardt (41:16):
Yeah. I love how well the Power Platform, and this idea of it being
middleware, just leans right into an idea that's been around for a
long time in companies, which is continuous improvement. You can
look at a problem, like the ones we've been describing, and you can
go down the path and you say, "Okay, is there a piece of software
that would solve or improve this problem?" You could look into
something like that. Or you could say, "Actually, we have these
other tools that we've been learning how to use and integrate into
our organization, and we'll just take a week, or three weeks and
make it better." If you decide to replace a silo down the road,
like, "Hey, we're going to do a CRM take out," you've not saddled
yourself up with this huge level of tech debt.
Rob Collie (42:05):
Yeah, that's huge.
Justin Mannhardt (42:06):
Because a lot of these decisions have so much pressure because
you're like, "If we don't get this right, then we'll have all
this." It's actually okay to be like, "Yeah, we're going to throw
this away and build a different one." I think that's an important
aspect of these things. You can empower a team of people who are
just interested in making things better and it's not this huge sunk
cost or investment that you're never going to get back. You're
going to get value from it, even if you're only going to leverage
it, say for a year. It's like, "Hey, that week was worth it because
it eliminated this many errors," or lost time, or whatever. Then we
did something else.
Rob Collie (42:44):
This really hearkens back to something that I struggled to explain
to people in my time at Microsoft. I had an intuition, and a lot of
people had the same intuition, we weren't doing a great job of
explaining it. What I'm going to talk about is the XML
revolution.
(43:01):
XML, and JSON, and all these sorts of things, are just taken for
granted today. There's nothing magic about them, it's completely
commoditized and that's the way it should be. But those of us who
saw this XML thing coming as a real game changer, I think we're
really just keying in on exactly this thing we're talking about.
The world had been obsessed with APIs up until that point. Every
system had an API on it that was capable of doing verby things.
Read/write, make changes. These APIs tended to be very heavy.
Anyone that's ever written any macro code against Excel will know
that the Excel API is incredibly complicated. I'm talking about the
desktop VBA comm automation. Go play around with the range object
for a couple of days.
(43:49):
The idea that two systems with good APIs could then talk to each
other was still this myth that I think most of the software world
believed. Our belief was stubbornly that we just hadn't gotten the
APIs right yet. The next standard in API was going to get it done.
What XML did, all it was really doing was saying, "Look, there's
going to be a data transmission format that is completely separate
from any API, and it's super, super readable, and it's super, super
simple." It's the beginning of this shock absorber mentality. Since
then, we've discovered that it doesn't have to be XML.
Justin Mannhardt (44:30):
Oh, yeah.
Rob Collie (44:31):
But the XML thing did eventually lead us down the road of Hadoop,
and DataLakes, and all of that. But yeah, this notion that you get
the necessary data from system one, and there's this temporary ah,
breath that you can take, and you can disconnect the process of
slurp from system one and inject new into the other system. You can
ever so slightly disconnect those two so they're not talking
directly to each other. When you do that, you gain just massive,
massive, massive benefits.
(45:03):
Yeah, it's kind of neat to connect that now. Again, I used to talk
to people all the time like, "No, XML is magic. It's going to blah,
blah, blah." People would go, like my old boss did, again would be
like, "I don't get it. Why is it magic?" I'd be like, "Well, it
just is, man. You don't understand." He beat that out of me. It was
one of the greatest that anyone's ever given me. By the time I was
done with him, I could explain why XML was valuable but not at the
beginning. I certainly didn't envision where we've landed
here.
(45:27):
Okay, so I think this was pretty straightforward, right? If you
want to identify what digital transformation means for your
organization ... This actually really parallels the talk I gave on
AI the other night here in Indy.
Justin Mannhardt (45:39):
Oh, right. Yeah.
Rob Collie (45:40):
Don't talk about it from the tech point of view.
Justin Mannhardt (45:43):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (45:43):
Think about it from the workflow point of view. Where are the
workflows in your company? What's really beautiful about digital
transformation is that we can provide this extra guidance that,
what are the workflows that happen between systems or adjacent to
systems?
Justin Mannhardt (46:00):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (46:00):
It helps you focus on what we're talking about. It's not often you
get a cheat code like that, so you can really zero in on
something.
(46:08):
I suspect that once you have that algorithm for looking, you're
going to find lots of things. The Power Platform makes it-
Justin Mannhardt (46:18):
Ah, it transforms them in digital ways.
Rob Collie (46:20):
It puts that completely within range, completely within budget in a
way that you wouldn't necessarily even expect. It's just kind of
magic. It's the same level of magic that you'd get from Power BI,
but in a read/write workflow sense.
Justin Mannhardt (46:33):
Between and adjacent to, that's magic. That's a magic algorithm
because I bet a lot of people, when you say digital transformation,
they are thinking on or within the system, not between it.
Rob Collie (46:45):
Yeah. It's another one of these marketing terms that's almost
deliberately meant to be mystical. Everyone's supposed to pretend
that they know what it means, but then it's left for all of us out
here in the real world, close to where the rubber meets the road,
to actually do something real with it.
(46:59):
I wonder what percentage of the time people use the phrase digital
transformation, if you scratch the surface, you'd find that they
were completely bluffing?
Justin Mannhardt (47:07):
Yeah. There's a category of thinking digital transformation, or
even data analytics, where there's just all these abstract,
conceptual statements or diagrams that mean very little. Let's just
zoom into an actual problem, even if it's a little one, and fix it.
Then, we'll go to the next one and fix that. We don't need big,
fancy frameworks, teams, and steering committees to do any of
that.
Rob Collie (47:35):
I've got another example.
Justin Mannhardt (47:36):
Oh, yeah?
Rob Collie (47:37):
It's one that we've implemented here at P3. We have these Power BI
dashboards that measure the effectiveness of our advertising. It
turns out that advertising in particular on Google AdWords is not a
global thing. It's the sum of many micro trends, your overall
performance. It's highly, highly, highly variable based on which
keywords you're matching against, what kinds of searches you're
matching against, and what kind of messaging you're presenting to
the user of Google. The only way to improve, most of the time, is
to improve in the details.
(48:11):
All right. For a while, we had this workflow where we'd identify an
intersection of ads that we were running and what we were matching
up with, in terms of people's searches. We'd identify a cluster of
those that, I'll just keep it simple for the moment, where we'd
say, "Look, right now we're providing the same message to a bunch
of searches that aren't really the same search and we need to break
this out, and provide a more custom, tailored message to each of
these individual searches." We'd mark something for
granularization.
(48:43):
But originally, what we would do is we were looking at this report,
we'd write down essentially this intersection and say, "Go split
that out."
Justin Mannhardt (48:51):
What did we do?
Rob Collie (48:52):
Immediately, we'd lose all track of what did we even decide to do?
Because then someone had to go over to totally Google AdWords
system and enter new ads, and break this thing out. Even knowing
whether that had happened, producing the work list of things that
needed to happen, was very difficult because we were in the context
of a Power BI dashboard that didn't do any communication elsewhere.
We couldn't track what our to-do list was. Except again, completely
offline. We built a Power App and embedded it into some of these
reports. You'd click on the thing you'd want to break out, the
Power App would pick up that context, and then we'd just use a
little drop-down and say, "What do we want to do to this?" We're
going to mark this for granularization.
(49:39):
That did produce us a to-do list, that then could also be
re-imported back into the report, so that we could se that we had
marked that one to explode it out. We didn't have to look at it
again, and we also in the reporting, could see whether that
splitting up had been done because you'd come back to the Power App
and say, "Done." Even better, you'd enter the IDs of the new
groups, so that you can say, "Hey, this one is now superseded by
these."
(50:07):
Now we never got to the point of directly writing back to Google
AdWords to make the changes. That still happened offline. We
certainly could have imagined a world in which a Power App, a much
more elaborate process was built that, then separately from the
dashboard, would prompt you to write the new ad copy and things
like that. You get to choose where the 80/20 is in your process.
For us, the 80/20 was recording the list and tracking the lineage
while we're in the context of the report. That was a big
deal.
Justin Mannhardt (50:39):
There are over 1000 pre-built and certified connectors available
for the Power Platform.
Rob Collie (50:46):
That's it? Just kidding.
Justin Mannhardt (50:48):
They're adding things all the time. We live in a SaaS world. All
these things, they're real.
Rob Collie (50:53):
Yeah. That's a really critical point about Microsoft, is that they
have realized that they are the middleware company.
Justin Mannhardt (50:59):
Satya is all about it.
Rob Collie (51:00):
Yes. In the Bill and Steve era, this was not Microsoft's game. They
wanted to own everything.
Justin Mannhardt (51:06):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (51:07):
In Satya era, it's more like, "No, we want to work with
everything."
Justin Mannhardt (51:11):
It's great, I love it.
Rob Collie (51:12):
Just recently, as I've gone down this path myself, reverse
engineering in my own little way what this term means and coming to
the conclusions that we have, I've realized that we are a digital
transformation company. It's not the only thing that we do. Is read
only Power BI middleware, is that digital transformation? Well,
probably. By the strictest definition, probably yes, but not by the
spirit of the law. The spirit of the definition means a read/write
workflow. I'd mentioned in this last example, Power BI can be part
of a read/write workflow. There's no reason to sideline it. In the
other episodes, where we talked about improvement and action is the
goal, how a Power App can be added to a Power BI report to help you
take action on what the report is telling you. But just the broader
Power Platform, Power Apps and Power Automate in particular. We do
have a handful of clients where, most of the work we're doing is
digital transformation work.
Justin Mannhardt (52:08):
Right, this type of work.
Rob Collie (52:09):
The adjacent in between that we're talking about. Even though we're
mostly thought of as a Power BI company, as we're doing our next
round of website rebuild, we've 100% put a digital transformation
page on our sitemap. It'll probably use some of this language we're
talking about here. Digital transformation, what does it mean? It
is both not that special of a term, there's no rocket science to
it, and at the same time, there's a lot of value to be realized
from it.
Justin Mannhardt (52:36):
Totally. Here's a fun little call back to our origin story as
individuals and as a company. We spend a lot of our time helping,
for example, like the Excel analyst move over to Power BI and we're
trying to solve these middleware gaps. That's why I think, for us,
it's just been quite natural to provide these types of services and
capabilities to customers as we've grown because it's the same type
of person that's spirited to solve these types of issues, and the
technology, and the openness of it brought everything in range.
It's fun to reflect back on how broad we can show up to a customer
beyond just dashboards.
Rob Collie (53:22):
Yeah. It's a miracle and a testament to what Microsoft has pulled
off. You can certainly imagine a world in which they could enable
that uptempo, highly efficient, what we call faucets first
methodology for dashboards.
Justin Mannhardt (53:22):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (53:38):
And stopping there. To extend it to something like workflow and
applications, and have implementation of these solutions feel very,
very, very similar.
Justin Mannhardt (53:50):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (53:50):
It's completely compatible with our ethos. It's almost like I
didn't even notice when we made that transition into doing both. It
sneaked up on me. That's a good sign. I feel a little silly that it
took me a while to digest it, but I love that it happened
organically without us having to go-
Justin Mannhardt (54:10):
Right.
Rob Collie (54:11):
Pick up another toolset from another vendor, or change our hiring
profile dramatically, or anything like that.
Justin Mannhardt (54:18):
Yeah. Now, we've got some of these cool projects where you've got
maybe someone that their expertise is more on the Power BI side,
working right alongside someone whose expertise is more on the
Power Apps, Power Automate side. They're just moving in lockstep
with the same customer, closing these middleware gaps, building the
reporting, and the action lives around it. It's that whole thing
working together that makes it all really cool.
Rob Collie (54:41):
I'm also developing an intuition that AI, maybe not the only
application of AI, but I think a lot of the surface area of where
we will find AI to be useful, plugs into this digital
transformation thing, the adjacent in between. In particular, in
sub workflows within the overall workflow.
Justin Mannhardt (55:03):
Yes.
Rob Collie (55:03):
Did your reaction fit that?
Justin Mannhardt (55:06):
Yes, totally. Totally, totally, totally. Yeah.
Rob Collie (55:09):
Then, we're good. I think it's easy, with dashboards, with BI, to
imagine the global. Going from a non-dashboard company to a
dashboard company, it's very easy to imagine that as a global thing
and it's probably the right thing. Any place where you're flying
without the information you need in a convenient, easy to digest
format, let's go and get that. Even there, with the transformation
to a data oriented organization, a data driven culture, you still
pick places to start.
Justin Mannhardt (55:39):
You got to start somewhere.
Rob Collie (55:40):
This other thing, digital transformation is a little harder to
imagine is a global thing, and that's fine. I think AI's the same
way. You should not be thinking about AI as a global transformation
for your business. Just like digital transformation, it is a go
find particular places where you can score these wins.
Speaker 4 (56:00):
Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. Let
the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to
p3adaptive.com. Have a data day.