Sep 14, 2021
Shelly Avery is a member of Microsoft's Healthcare Solution Acceleration Team, helping Healthcare customers digitally transform their businesses. As you listen to this conversation you'll realize, as we did, that Shelly knows the tech AND the human side of the tech very well!
References in this episode:
- 4:30 - The high value of customization and integrations in BI in the current era of Middleware, Microsoft Teams and how good it is at connecting humans, The speed of Innovation at MS (some of which is directly customer influenced)
- 32:10 - Microsoft's FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability) is revolutionizing the rather large problem of interoperability in the Healthcare space
- 49:30 - Microsoft Viva is born from My Analytics, Rob gets into Headspace, using data for nefarious purposes
Episode Transcript:
Rob Collie (00:00:00):
Hello friends. Today's guest is Shelly Avery. We've had a lot of
Microsoft employees on the show and Shelley continues that
tradition. The reason we have that tradition is because there are
so many interesting things going on at Microsoft these days. And
Shelley brought some super fascinating topics and perspectives to
our conversation. For instance, she has a deep background and
history with the Teams product for Microsoft. And so we got into
the question of what is it that makes Teams so special? I really,
really, really appreciated and enjoyed her answer.
Rob Collie (00:00:31):
And given her current focus on the healthcare industry and on
health solutions, we talked a lot about how Microsoft's business
applications and Power Platform strategy is actually a perfect fit
for what's going on in healthcare today. We did touch on some
familiar themes there, such as the new era of middleware, how a 99%
solution to a problem is often a 0% solution to a problem. How even
100% of a solution itself is a moving target. And my only slightly
partisan opinion that may be Microsoft's competitors in all of
these spaces should just save themselves the trouble and tap out
now. We talk about the virtual teams that exist on the Teams team
at Microsoft. Sorry, I just had to work that into the intro.
Rob Collie (00:01:17):
I learned a new acronym, FHIR, which is the new upcoming regulatory
and technological standard for data interoperability in the
healthcare space. We talk a little bit about Veeva. Have you heard
of Veeva? I hadn't. It's one of those technologies with a
tremendous amount of potential to be used in a positive way and
maybe a little bit of potential to be misused if we're not careful.
And that conversation was also the excuse for our first ever sound
effects here on the Raw Data Podcast. We spared no expense. An
iPhone was held very close to a microphone. All in all, just a
delightful conversation. I smiled the whole time. We also had the
ever upbeat and awesome Krissy in the co-pilot's chair for the
duration of this conversation. And with that completely
unintentional rhyme out of the way, let's get into it.
Announcer (00:02:04):
Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?
Rob Collie (00:02:11):
This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast, with your host, Rob
Collie. 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. Welcome to the show. Shelly Avery, how
are you doing this morning?
Shelly Avery (00:02:35):
Hey guys, doing good today.
Rob Collie (00:02:37):
Well, thanks so much for being here. Another brave soul, first time
meeting us. You're willing to have it recorded. That's into the
breach. I like it.
Shelly Avery (00:02:45):
It's good to meet you guys. I'm happy to talk to you today.
Rob Collie (00:02:48):
We brought Krissy today.
Krissy Dyess (00:02:49):
How's everybody doing?
Rob Collie (00:02:51):
How are you Krissy? I mean, it's earlier your time.
Krissy Dyess (00:02:53):
It is early. Yeah. So normally we do these in the afternoon, but
it's early. I'm enjoying the sunrise this morning.
Rob Collie (00:03:00):
Oh, fantastic.
Krissy Dyess (00:03:00):
Doing good.
Rob Collie (00:03:01):
Yeah. A cup of joe, maybe.
Krissy Dyess (00:03:03):
I don't drink coffee.
Shelly Avery (00:03:04):
I've had two today.
Rob Collie (00:03:05):
Shelly, I actually already noticed that. I had noticed before we
started recording that the color of your coffee cup changed. That,
yeah, she just hot swaps the coffee.
Shelly Avery (00:03:16):
Travel mug to drop off the kids this morning and then real mug once
I got back to the home office.
Rob Collie (00:03:22):
So Shelly, why don't you tell us what you're doing these days. Give
us your CV.
Shelly Avery (00:03:25):
I am at Microsoft now. I am in a new role that Microsoft has
created. I am on a team that is called the Healthcare Solution
Acceleration team. And our job is to really help our healthcare
customers digitally transform their businesses, hopefully using
Microsoft technology. But I've been here five years. I started as a
technical specialist, helping customers migrate from on-premise
server base infrastructure to Office 365, Exchange and SharePoint
in OneDrive. And then Microsoft Teams came around because it wasn't
around. It didn't exist when I started, and I became a Microsoft
Teams technical specialist. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved
it.
Shelly Avery (00:04:12):
Teams has really empowered the world to figure out how to do work
different. It created lots of opportunities for people to create
new ways of solving their business problems. And it was a lot of
fun to be able to partner with our customers and really help them
understand how technology can be an advocate for them and just help
them do things faster and more efficiently and on their own terms.
And so that was super fun, especially working with healthcare. I
learned through that about some other features that Microsoft had,
not that I didn't know, they didn't exist, but Power Platform,
Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, and then later Power Virtual
Agents.
Shelly Avery (00:05:00):
And using those inside of the UI of Microsoft Teams to even further
enhance what Teams does, which is communication and collaboration,
but then putting apps, low-code, no-code apps, and BI and data at
the fingertips of these individuals to really, really step up their
game and how they're solving their business problems. It's just
been super fun and I thoroughly enjoy it. And so taking all of that
into my new role, specifically working with healthcare and trying
to help them accelerate solutions in their organization to solve
their business problems. I thoroughly enjoy what I do every
day.
Rob Collie (00:05:41):
Do you think that your recent background in Teams was a selection
criteria for going into health? It would really seem to me like
that strong basis in Teams is really quite an asset for you in the
healthcare specific role.
Shelly Avery (00:05:55):
Well, I of course would love to say yes. And I think it is for me,
that's how I learned. It's a background that I feel like I'm an
asset to my customers, but my new team is comprised of people from
all different backgrounds. And so what our new team hopes to be is
people who are deep in various different technology areas so that
we can lean on each other's expertise when a solution isn't bound
by Microsoft Teams. So maybe we need to create a bot in Azure and
build it off of a SQL database and put it in Teams. And so we're
crossing the entire Microsoft stack. And so, yes, I'm deep in
Office 365 and Teams and getting much better into the Power
Platform, but as soon as I need to build a bot in Azure, I'm like,
"What, how do I do that?"
Shelly Avery (00:06:59):
So I need that other person on my team who is deep in that area.
We're here with you guys. I know y'all are deep in Power BI. We
have data scientists on our team and experts in Power BI, which I
am not that, but I leverage them because when I talk to my
customers, they want to create dashboards and reports that they can
have actionable insights on. And so I understand the use case or
the problem they're trying to solve. And then I work with my data
scientists on the team to help. We come together and bring our
skills together to help the customer. So it's just a super fun
team. We all geek out in our own area.
Rob Collie (00:07:38):
Yeah. I mean, it is really a perfect little microcosm of what
Microsoft is trying to do with the Power Platform in general. Isn't
it? Years ago when they renamed, they Microsoft renamed the Data
Insights Summit to be the Business Applications Summit, it wasn't
really clear what was going on. There just seemed like one of those
funky Microsoft renames. You know how Microsoft changes the
acronyms for all you folks in the field, every 18 months, just for
yucks. It seemed like one of those, but no, that wasn't it at all,
right? There actually was a really long-term grand plan that was
already clear behind the scenes there, that just wasn't really
clear on the outside.
Rob Collie (00:08:18):
And all of these technologies coming together, the low-code,
no-code or rapid development, whatever you want to call it, right?
All of these tools, they enable something to come to life that
every single environment, every single customer is different and
their needs are different. Their fundamental technological systems
that they use, all their mind of business applications, all of
those are different and unique. They're unique mix. Plus then you
add in the unique challenges that are going on in their particular
environment.
Rob Collie (00:08:45):
You want something off the shelf, but at the same time, if it's not
incredibly flexible, if it's not incredibly customizable, it's
never ever, ever going to meet the needs of that reality. And I
think Microsoft has one of the strongest long-term bets I've ever
seen Microsoft make. And it's been really interesting to see it
come into focus over the years.
Shelly Avery (00:09:06):
I'm glad you see that and a lot of people do, but we have a lot of
customers. I keep saying health because that's who I work with,
that there are health care pointed solutions that are out there
that have a single purpose and they are off the shelf. And they do
usually do a great job at what they do, but they only do one thing.
And we find that almost every application or SaaS that they
subscribe to or purchase, has to be connected to data or systems or
things like that. And then they have 50 different apps all
connected to 50 different things, and it becomes complex. And you
have service contracts and everything has to be managed. And so we
are pushing that we have a turnkey solution.
Shelly Avery (00:09:54):
We're actually saying the opposite. We have a solution that gets
you 80, 85% of the way there, but then that last bit is fully
customizable to make it exactly like you want. And so sometimes
that's hard to tell a customer that, "Hey, you're going to pay for
something and then you have to build it," or, "You have to pay
someone else to help you build it." And they have to be able to see
the benefit of that to keep costs down and reduce complexity and
app sprawl is something that we see a lot. And so being able to
streamline that is something that we definitely try to do and help
our customers understand the benefit of.
Rob Collie (00:10:33):
Sometimes 99% rounds to zero. You have a 99% solution to something,
but you simply cannot do the last 1%. And a lot of cases, that's
just a failure. I think a lot of off the shelf software, even if it
got to 99% of what you need, which is a phenomenal number, it's
still not doing it. Plus we also got to remember that the 100%
target is also not static. Things change. Even if you're 100%
today, your needs tomorrow are going to be different. The ability
to customize, the ability to create new integrations and new
applications, even if they're lightweight within your environment,
is an ongoing must.
Rob Collie (00:11:16):
I think approaching this as a platform while at the same time
making that platform very humane, it doesn't require me to sit down
and write C-Sharp every single time I need something new, that's
just amazing. I think if you zoom back on all of this, it's almost
obvious once you know what to look for. All of the individual
systems that we buy, and this is even true of our business here at
P3. We're, "Best of breed," in terms of all the line of business
software that we've adopted. Best of breed, AKA, whatever we
stumbled into at that particular point in time. All those little
silos, those line of business silos are very competent. Maybe not
excellent all the time, but they're very competent at what that
silo is supposed to do.
Rob Collie (00:11:59):
But an overall business environment, an overall team environment
doesn't stop at those silos. It's like the whole thing. It's the
whole picture. It's the whole organic total across all of those
silos. That's where you live. You don't live in one of them. And so
integration across them of various flavors. I think we're in this
new second or third era of middleware right now. And Microsoft is
just so, so, so well positioned in this game. I didn't see this
coming. I just woke up one day and went, "Oh, oh my gosh. Look at
what my old buddies are up to." Checkmate. It's been really cool to
watch.
Shelly Avery (00:12:40):
Yeah. It's been really awesome to be here and live it. Sometimes
when you're in it, you don't see it happening. And then you look
back and you say, "Wow, we've come a long way in the last three
years or five years."
Rob Collie (00:12:52):
Yeah. Let's talk about Teams a little bit more before we switch
back into health.
Shelly Avery (00:12:57):
Yeah, sure.
Rob Collie (00:12:57):
I find the Teams phenomenon to be just fascinating, which is
another way of saying that I missed it a little way, right? Back
when I worked on the Excel team, every few years whenever office
would finish a release, there'd be like this open season of
recruiting. People could move around within office, like a passport
free zone. You could just go wherever you wanted. I always
struggled to get people who had never worked on Excel to come work
on Excel. It was scary.
Rob Collie (00:13:24):
They've been working on things like Outlook or Word or something
like that. It's easy to be, "An expert user of Outlook." It's easy
to be an expert user of Word. In other words, the difference
between the 80th percentile user of those apps and the 99th
percentile user of those apps, it's hard to even distinguish. You
can't even really tell the difference between them and practical
usage. That's not true for Excel though, right?
Shelly Avery (00:13:44):
Right.
Rob Collie (00:13:45):
An Excel expert is like a magician compared to an amateur. And so
that was really intimidating, I think. That was the fundamental
reason why people struggled to take the leap to come to the Excel
team. They felt more comfortable where they were, but a pitch I
always gave, which were about a 20% success rate, was data fits
through a computer really well. A CPU can improve data. It's built
for that. Whereas Outlook and Word, even PowerPoint, I've revised
my opinion on all of these since then, but this is me in my early
30s. Going, all those other things, those are about ideas, and
communication, and collaboration.
Rob Collie (00:14:25):
And that's all human stuff. And human stuff doesn't really fit
through a CPU all that well. It doesn't come out the other side,
enriched in the same way that data does it. Hubris in hindsight,
right? I said, "There's never an end to how the improvement that
can happen in Excel." Whereas something like Outlook or Word, might
be essentially nearing its end state. Then comes Teams, right?
Teams is the kryptonite to that whole pitch. I hear myself back in
the early 2000s, Teams is all about human interaction. I guess
that's what it does.
Rob Collie (00:15:02):
I guess, to me, it's this alien form, Teams has just exploded.
People love it. It's everywhere. I mean, this is an impossible
question to answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway, because it's
fun to do. What is it? Why are people so excited about Teams? For a
while there, it's like SharePoint held a fraction of this
excitement. It's in a similar spot, the hub for collaboration in
the Microsoft ecosystem. It feels like Teams has said, "Here, let
me show you what that really looks like."
Shelly Avery (00:15:36):
Yeah. I'll do my best to try, but this is my opinion. I don't know
what anybody else thinks, but I think it takes the best of the
consumer world and the best of the enterprise or commercial world
and puts it together all in one app. It has things that when you
chat with somebody, it's like you're using a text message. So it's
no different than, if you're an Apple user, you open your phone and
you go to the green text message app or you go to the Teams app and
it looks exactly the same. It has gifts and it has reactions, and
you can put stickers and memes in there. And so it's super fun.
Shelly Avery (00:16:19):
But then you take that enterprise and you can also share a OneDrive
link or create a meeting or send someone an Outlook invite or
whatever. So it takes that enterprise and mushes it with
consumerism. And so it's like taking Facebook and LinkedIn and
Office and SharePoint and smashing it all into one app. And so you
can have fun with it. You can build relationships with your
colleagues or even people external to your organization, but then
you can also build presentations and dashboards and create, and
even use the Power Platform from a low-code dev perspective, right
inside of Teams.
Shelly Avery (00:17:02):
It spans the spectrum of fun to developing brand new stuff. And so
everybody can get something out of it and they can use it the way
they want to use it for the purpose that they need to work on,
whatever they're doing for the day. And so it can be great for
various different people in various different ways.
Rob Collie (00:17:28):
I love that answer.
Krissy Dyess (00:17:29):
I have a different perspective. I came from a background of data
and technical and all of that type of thing, but this Teams, really
with everything transitioning to remote in a hurry over the last
year, I feel like it really helps with a level of organization and
communication and assets that you talked about, Shelly, to
centralize all that because in a difference of data coming at you
from many places, now we have communications, now we have remote
teams.
Krissy Dyess (00:18:05):
And I love, like you said, it is fun, it's interactive. Here's
where I'm struggling a little bit with Teams. I love it, but what
is proper Teams etiquette in terms of like meetings and
conversations? For example, I'm having a meeting and I don't want
to interrupt somebody, so I'm going to put it in the chat. But then
sometimes people feel like, well, the chat is still a form of
interruption. I see it as a form of participation. And so I think
people are still learning how to embrace these tools.
Shelly Avery (00:18:38):
Yeah. Well, I think that it also comes to culture.
Krissy Dyess (00:18:41):
Sure.
Shelly Avery (00:18:41):
And Microsoft has an amazing culture. We have been on a journey
through Satya, our CEO, on really changing the culture of
inclusivity and a growth mindset. And it's interesting when we
interact with customers who don't have a very friendly and open
culture. But I think you use it the way it works for you and for
the people that you're working with and your culture. So if you're
in a small team setting and it's friendly people, you should feel
comfortable to use it the way that it makes you feel
comfortable.
Shelly Avery (00:19:23):
But if you're in a quarterly business review with executives, I
mean, think about it. If you're going to lunch with your buddies,
you're going to act different than if you're going to a formal
dinner with executives, right? And so you use the technology in a
way that you would use real life. And so if I'm going to lunch with
my buddies, I'm going to be cutting up and giving them funny gifts
and patting them on the back. And if I'm in a business meeting with
executives, I'm going to have my best dress on and my polite
manners. So I'm going to act that way in a meeting too.
Krissy Dyess (00:19:51):
I totally agree with you. I've had the opportunity recently to work
with the Microsoft team and I agree there's a completely different
culture than what we see, even from my background, even from our
culture, I mean, we're all friendly and stuff. Every organization
does have their own culture and exactly what you pointed out, even
within that organization, there are different levels and
cadences.
Shelly Avery (00:20:13):
Yeah, it's crazy. So I spent the last three years helping IT
organizations deploy Microsoft Teams. And I did that in the midst
of COVID, in healthcare. So when you say remote work overnight,
literally help telecare organizations enable 35,000 individuals for
Teams over a weekend. To the question about culture, it was very
difficult for some of the IT organizations to say, "Well, what
should we allow our users to do?" There's sensitivity that you can
set on gifts in a team. You can say, do we want them to be explicit
or PG-13 or PG or G?
Shelly Avery (00:20:58):
And I had one organization that if there was anything to do with a
gift that had to do with politics, that was seen offensive, because
what if I sent you a Trump gift and you were a Biden person. I
mean, how dare you do that? And so that company was very, very
sensitive and they would only allow gifts at a G rating. And a G
rating were like cartoons and stickers, where other organizations
are like, whatever. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Shelly Avery (00:21:29):
So there's definitely different cultures and different
organizations across the country. And so luckily, there are the
controls in the back end and the administrative section on those
kinds of things. And then for data too, do you want data to be
shared externally or do you want people to be able to chat
externally or not? And who do they want to be able to chat with? So
there's lots of governance and data protection controls in the
background.
Krissy Dyess (00:21:58):
And being a data person, what is really cool about Teams and all
these things that you just described is on the backend, all of that
stuff is just data. That's why you can control. That's why you can
help your organization with these. And I think that's really cool.
I am super excited about Teams. I was excited about Power Pivot in
Excel, and I was excited with Power BI Desktop, and what you
explained too, how it starts to integrate the Power Apps, the bots,
all of that into this changing ecosystem of how we work, the
ability to bring that from the top level all the way down to the
frontline workers, to impact and drive actions, I am super excited
about Teams. I can't wait to see how organizations learn more, how
that they can adopt these tools, because I think there's so much
that people just don't know because it is so new and it's a
different way, just like Power BI was.
Shelly Avery (00:22:57):
I'll give you an example about that. We have this one group inside
of Microsoft, it's called the [SLATE 00:23:04] team. And you know
how Microsoft is with making acronyms. I have no idea what SLATE
actually stands for, but what they do is they work with customers
who have a unique idea and they help them build low-code or apps
inside a Teams. And they built this one app called the Company
Communicator. Basically what it is, is it's like a mass texting
app, where I can create a little message and push it out via chat
or via a Team to everyone in the organization or to a subset of
people.
Shelly Avery (00:23:39):
And it created a cute little adaptive card where you could put a
headline and a picture, and then a little message. After that got
so popular, Microsoft built it into the product, right? It started
from a customer, it went through a program. It was customer purpose
built. Then it got so much organic growth through all of our
customers loving this idea of pushing notifications. So we turned
it into code and now it's in the product. I think that, that is so
cool, how Teams is democratizing the ability for customers to
influence product and future releases that now everybody in the
world gets to take advantage of.
Shelly Avery (00:24:28):
So that's another thing that I just, I love about it as a product,
but also we call it the Teams team at Microsoft, is they're
innovating so fast and I'm just a few months out of that role and I
already feel behind. I just saw a blog with what's new in Teams in
August. And I'm like, I need to go and read this to make sure I
know everything that's new because they just come out with so much
new stuff every month. And it closes the gap, Rob, you mentioned
earlier, when a product's only 99%, it's really zero.
Shelly Avery (00:25:03):
I think the bet on Microsoft is, it might be 99% today, but it's
probably going to be 100% in a couple of months because we're
innovating so fast. And your 99% today, isn't going to be your 99%
in six months. And so it's a moving target, not only for the
customer, but for Microsoft too. And so we want to catch up with
features that are on the backlog, but the backlog just keeps
growing and growing. And so the faster we can innovate and build
these into the product, we will.
Rob Collie (00:25:33):
I just feel like if you're watching a really high stakes chess
match, which I never do, but imagine that you did, to the untrained
eye, this is an even game. And all of a sudden, one of the chess
masters just resigned, just tips the king over and says, "Yeah,
I've lost." I just feel like as a software industry, we should just
take a moment and say, "Hey, Salesforce, all your other, your SAP,
do y'all just want to call it, you want to just tip your Kings
over, save us all a lot of trouble." I don't even work for
Microsoft and I'm looking at this going, "Oh, boy." Remember, I'm
not paid to say this. I really think Microsoft has really, really,
really dialed it in.
Rob Collie (00:26:16):
I'd like to also go back to your answer about why Teams is so
special. I think it was a perfect answer. Rewind 10 years, 11
years, I'm struggling to explain to people why this whole DAX and
tabular data modeling thing that was only present at that time,
only in the Excel environment, and only as an add in, it was, in
some ways the most primitive exposure possible of this new
technology. I was trying to explain to people why this was so
special. And it was particularly difficult to explain it to people
who had intimately known it's [4Runner 00:26:49], which was the
analysis services multi-dimensional.
Rob Collie (00:26:52):
And really, technologically speaking, there wasn't too much about
this new thing that was superior. If you looked that gift horse in
the mouth and examined its lines and everything, you'd be like,
there's really not much different here or it's clearly better. Now
it had one thing that was clearly better, which was the in-memory
column oriented compression. And that was pretty sci-fi. That was
pretty cool, but it wasn't the tech. It wasn't like one of these
was able to make the CPU scream at 500% capacity or something like
that. It wasn't that at all. It was that this new tech fit the way
humans work so perfectly. It met the humans where they were,
whereas the previous one forced the human world to bend to its
will. The humans had to come to it and meet it where it was. And
this is a very subtle and nuanced point.
Rob Collie (00:27:49):
But in practice, it is everything. In practice, it means that a
company like ours, that operates completely differently than the
data consulting firms and BI professional services firms of the
past, and really honestly, today, I think most firms are still
operating that old way. We're a completely different species of a
company. And we exist because these tools work a different way for
the humans. And over and over and over again, this is why the ROI
from Power BI is so insane when you use it the right way, when you
really lean into it strikes. Your explanation about Teams, it
echoed that for me. It's professional tool that fits the humans
really well.
Rob Collie (00:28:36):
And you don't typically talk about stuff like that. If you're a
technology professional, those kinds of answers, you're always
looking for some sort of more hardcore answer. It's capabilities.
Look at the check boxes it's got on the box, right? This other
description of it fits the humans really well, it's not a good
sales pitch, but in reality, it's everything. It's a difficult
thing to do, right?
Rob Collie (00:28:59):
One of its chief strengths is also just, doesn't make a good sound
bite or like, oh, okay. So now you have to wait and see it for
yourself. You have to experience it. And I think that's what we've
seen. Is that the people who've really leaned into Teams, they all
have this surprised reaction, or they say, six to 12 months after
really getting into it, as they describe how much they like it,
there's this undertone of, "Yeah, it's really turned out to be
amazing." You can tell that they didn't quite expect it. And now
they're a convert.
Shelly Avery (00:29:31):
Well, I think a lot of IT organizations, they push applications out
and Teams to the masses is, oh, it's just another application that
IT is forcing us to use. And they're resistant to change because
the last app IT pushed out wasn't great. And then they finally get
in there and they do what you and I are talking about. They chat in
it, they text in it, they meet in it, they have fun in it. And then
six months later, they're like, "How did I do my job without this?"
They enjoy it. It's easy to use, it's very accommodating and
friendly to different personalities and different work types. And
it's so unique in the way that you and I and Krissy can all use it
all day long, every day, and we use it completely differently, and
yet we all have the same opinion of it, is it works great for
me.
Rob Collie (00:30:30):
That's the whole mark of a successful product. And one that spreads
itself, right? It develops impassioned evangelists. Again, just
like everyone else, I would not have seen that coming.
Shelly Avery (00:30:41):
You were at Microsoft from an Excel Power Pivot perspective and you
now are not, and have started your own business and they're
successful in that. I know people that worked at Microsoft and
literally quit Microsoft just to be a YouTube star on how awesome
Teams is and all the cool stuff you can do with it, and they've
made a living out of it because it's a product that does so much
and it's never ending in the way that it can be used and how unique
it is. It blows me away when I actually saw a gentleman who was at
Microsoft as a product manager and I followed him on YouTube, and
then one day he said, his YouTube post was, "I am retiring from
Microsoft." And he was younger than I am. I'm like, "How are you
mean you're retiring?"
Krissy Dyess (00:31:32):
I followed the same story that you did, Shelly. I know exactly who
you're talking about. What I really love, what the appeal of it to
me is, is it's always these little things that people don't know
that make the biggest impact. And when you're in an environment
where you're not exposed to people doing those neat tips and
tricks, having the ability of finding somebody out onto YouTube
sharing that, and then you can bring it into your organization and
start to spread it, it's really impactful because a lot of times
people think, "Oh, it needs to be this complicated technical
solution." And honestly, it's always the little things that people
are like, "Wow, I didn't know I could do that."
Shelly Avery (00:32:12):
Agreed.
Rob Collie (00:32:13):
So let's turn the corner. Let's talk about health, Shelly. Where
should we start?
Shelly Avery (00:32:16):
Well, when you were talking earlier about how Microsoft Teams is
this new thing, I think people had an aha moment and I think there
is an aha moment that is about to come in health. And I'd love to
talk about that for a minute. I think it plays into your audience
well because it's about data.
Rob Collie (00:32:41):
Very important question. Are there people involved?
Shelly Avery (00:32:43):
There are people involved.
Rob Collie (00:32:45):
Oh, okay then. We're good. We're good.
Shelly Avery (00:32:46):
Yeah, yeah.
Rob Collie (00:32:47):
Okay. All right.
Shelly Avery (00:32:48):
Yeah. There is interoperability of data in health. So think about,
from a human perspective, heaven forbid you get in a car accident
and you go to an ER and they have to bandage you up. That ER is
owned by some health organization and they now have data on you,
but it's not the same health organization where you go to see your
primary care physician. And so how does your primary care physician
know about your ER visit and how do they know what medicines that
you were given and whether those had adverse reactions to you or
not?
Shelly Avery (00:33:22):
Well, without interoperability of data, that just doesn't happen.
And there is an old version of healthcare interoperability called
HL7. Again, another acronym, but the new interoperability standard
is called FHIR, Fast Healthcare Interoperability. The idea of FHIR
is supposed to be universal so that that ER can digitally transfer
that information to your PCP, your primary care physician. And so
your medical record and your information can stay up-to-date with
all the people that are medically treating you or for even you,
like if you move to another city and you want to say, "Hey, I need
all my information. I'm going to take it to my new doctor."
Shelly Avery (00:34:10):
And so this idea of interoperability, it's not a Microsoft thing.
It's a healthcare standard that is happening in the industry. But
what Microsoft has done is we have gone full steam ahead on this
FHIR interoperability and built a stack of technology solutions
based on ingesting data through FHIR. And we have a bunch of
healthcare APIs, FHIR API being one of them, to now take all those
low-code, Power Platform, Microsoft Teams, bots, and hydrate those
apps with all of this data from healthcare to now be able to really
unleash this data.
Shelly Avery (00:35:02):
So you need an app to have a rounding solution bedside in a
hospital. You now have the ability to suck that data in from Rob,
that he's been to the ER and his primary care physician, and now
you're in for knee surgery. And so I have all that information
that's aggregated from all over, and now it's in this cute little
rounding app that we built off of Power Platform, or same thing
with Power BI, or a chat bot in Teams. We can chat this health data
and say, "Hey, is Rob's labs ready yet?" And the chat bot goes and
sucks that data in and says, "Yes, here's Rob's labs. Here's the
link to it."
Shelly Avery (00:35:44):
And so just being able to unleash that and build these apps or bots
or experiences for the human to be able to interact with that data
is really what we are trying to do. And so I'm super excited about
it. This is a new team that I'm on and this is really what we're
trying to drive. So I think it's going to be game changer for the
industry.
Rob Collie (00:36:09):
So this is my first time hearing of this new interoperability
standard. First of all, FHIR, it sounds cool. I like it. It
definitely sounds like it's useful for sharing healthcare and
patient information across organizations. Do you also see it as
something that's going to be useful even within an organization,
like between the silos, between these different systems within a
single entity?
Shelly Avery (00:36:32):
Yes. And it will do that first before it goes across organizations.
And-
Rob Collie (00:36:37):
Okay.
Shelly Avery (00:36:38):
This is a challenge internally too, because there's software
technology that these electronic medical records, that your medical
record, my medical records sit in at each of these organizations.
And most large healthcare providers have multiple instances of
these electronic medical records. Sometimes they have multiple
different types through mergers and acquisitions and growth over
time, or this department got an upgrade, but the other department
didn't. And even amongst themselves, they can't share information
with each other. And so if a call center services 10,000 patients,
but they have four different electronic medical records, when Rob
calls into that call center, how the heck do I know which one
you're in and who you are and all that?
Shelly Avery (00:37:30):
So if we can use this FHIR interoperability to aggregate all of
that and have it in a single place, now we've built this great call
center app that knows that Rob is calling in and who you are. And I
immediately have your information. I could say, "Oh, Rob, are you
calling about the meds that you got from your ER visit last week?"
It's very personalized. So let's personalize care. Let's have
better patient engagement. Let's round with our patients and have
the right information where we need it, regardless of where the
original data sits.
Rob Collie (00:38:01):
So it's a new standard, FHIR, right?
Shelly Avery (00:38:04):
Yes.
Rob Collie (00:38:04):
And so let's pretend I'm a healthcare organization and I have,
again, these, "I've got a best of breed set up." I've got a jillion
different siloed line of business systems. Some of them are new,
some of them are not. These older systems that I have, they're not
going to be playing nice with this new FHIR standard. They haven't
even heard of it, that software. So-
Shelly Avery (00:38:24):
That's correct.
Rob Collie (00:38:25):
How do I, as an organization, connect those wires when some of my
more long-ended two systems aren't going to be supporting the
standard natively?
Shelly Avery (00:38:36):
And that's part of our challenge right now. A lot of the customers
that we're talking to, they see the future, they like the vision
that Microsoft is painting. They want these human interactions like
we're discussing, but they'll say to us, "We aren't ready for
FHIR," or, "We haven't made that transition yet." Our comment back
to them is we can help you get there. And it is a requirement that
they get there by a certain date in the future. So why not have a
company like Microsoft help them?
Shelly Avery (00:39:11):
Now, it's not necessarily an easy task. There are data mappings
that have to happen. And a lot of these electronic medical systems
are in the old standard, which we can map from the old standard to
the new standard. It takes a little bit of manual work, but you
only have to do it once, because once you do it once, it's in the
standard and now you've unleashed that data. There's also custom
fields though. Some developers-
Rob Collie (00:39:38):
Of course.
Shelly Avery (00:39:38):
Have gone into these electronic medical records and they built some
custom field that doesn't map to FHIR. So then you got to have
somebody who knows that. And so there is hard work to do it in the
beginning. I'm not trying to say that there isn't, but we do have
healthcare interoperability partners, and system integrators, and
Microsoft to help these organizations get into that standard. And
the new marketed term for all of this is the Microsoft Cloud for
Healthcare.
Shelly Avery (00:40:10):
And so it's all about ingesting that data and then unleashing that
data to create these great, either apps or applets, or bots, or
scenarios that empower the people who either work at these systems
or even for patients to be able to interact with and have better
experiences for themselves. And so, you only have to do the hard
work once and then it's in there. And so you're right. It isn't a
turnkey, there is work that has to be done, but they're going to
have to do it eventually. So we'd love to be able to partner with
them and help them get to meet those regulatory compliances that
are coming in the near future.
Rob Collie (00:40:52):
Yeah. Another example of where it's good to have a platform,
right?
Shelly Avery (00:40:55):
Right.
Rob Collie (00:40:56):
If that missing 1% is interoperability, that's a big 1% that a
platform like Microsoft is very, very, very prepared to help you
connect those dots. It also, it's really helpful that these older
systems that we're talking about, if they already had to, as you
pointed out, if they already had to play ball with an older
interoperability format, that's end sharp contrast to your average
line of business software that has no interest in interoperability
at all. T
Rob Collie (00:41:26):
he average line of business system is like, no, no, no, no, no. We
are a silo and we like being a silo. And why would we ... Mm-mm
(negative), no. We are here to hoard the valuable data that is
collected in here. Mm-mm (negative), no. Even though it sounds
rightfully like labor intensive, one time investment, compared to
the average interoperability game that happens across the world,
across all industries, it sounds like there's already a really,
really, really strong starting point. That's a big, big, big point
in your favor. Plus if it's going to be a regulatory standard in
the future, that is unheard either.
Shelly Avery (00:42:00):
Right.
Krissy Dyess (00:42:01):
I'm curious though, as to what changed, because honestly, it is one
of the reasons why I'm appointment averse, is because every time
you go into a different doctor and it's really common for people to
move nowadays. And you're like, oh, I got to fill out all the same
forms, over and over again. In my mind, I always thought it's
somewhere. Why can't it be everywhere? I guess I thought maybe
there was some privacy reason that was the blocker. Has something
changed there?
Shelly Avery (00:42:28):
You're absolutely right. And no, there is still what's called the
HIPAA regulations. And so the entire Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
is HIPAA compliant. It does meet all of the requirements for that.
And so the FHIR standard, FHIR mandate is under that HIPAA
compliance. And so that's a U.S. regulation. It's not in the EU or
others. They have their alternative to HIPAA around keeping
healthcare information protected. And it's important to be able to
do that. And so the old HL7 standard of interoperability was highly
customizable and the new FHIR standard is less customizable, and
that is how it is able to have more liquid interoperability.
Shelly Avery (00:43:27):
I'll give you an example. Sex and gender are two completely
different things. And we know that in this day and age, but in the
FHIR standard, there is a born sex and it is one or another, and
you can't really change it. But in the HL7, you could add seven or
eight or nine or 10 different categories for that. So when you have
the FHIR standards met, born sex is a one or a zero, basically.
Right now they have the other category of gender that there's a
bunch of options there. And then they even have another category.
And so it's creating the standard that everyone in healthcare has
to meet as opposed to going in and making it where I can make 37
customizations because in my hospital, I allow them to have 37
choices.
Shelly Avery (00:44:28):
Religion is another one. Religion is huge. I mean, there's endless
amounts of religions. In the FHIR standard, there's a set amount
and then in other. And so you have to fall into either the set
amount or other, and that allows for that more liquid
interoperability, or that is the goal. That's the goal of FHIR.
Now, I'm getting a little deeper into more of the regulatory
compliance and how the standards work. There's tons more deep
technical experts on healthcare compliance than I am. I'm more of a
technologist than a healthcare compliance expert, but knowing how
it works a little bit helps you understand why the technology is
empowering or we hope in the future has the potential to empower
the industry to be able to do more with this data.
Rob Collie (00:45:18):
Even that little deep dive there, I mean, that really, for me and
for the listeners, you really just certified your bonafides there.
If anyone was wondering how deep you were into this stuff. You
always got to be careful. You're not the expert on that. There are
people who know it much better than you. The fact that you know
that much while also being on top about all those other stuff,
you're in the right role. Like Holy cow.
Shelly Avery (00:45:41):
For my role, they did require healthcare expertise. And we have
another team that partners with us that actually are folks from the
industry. So we have MDs, PhDs, ex-CIOs and nurses with their RNs,
from industry that work at Microsoft as the healthcare industry
team, that partner with us around more of these deep healthcare
needs. And when we're talking to chief medical officers or chief
nursing officers, who doesn't like their title to be matched.
Shelly Avery (00:46:18):
So when we have a chief medical officer like Dr. Rhew at Microsoft,
or a chief nursing officer, or ex-CIOs of healthcare organizations
to come in and talk to current CIOs, they feel like we're talking
to them from their shoes. And so my team partners with that
industry team. Not that they aren't technical and don't understand
how the technology works, but we are supposed to understand
healthcare enough and how the technology fits for those healthcare
scenarios and use cases that they need help with.
Rob Collie (00:46:52):
To use a metaphor, if you're going to build re race cars, it helps
to hire some people who drive race cars.
Shelly Avery (00:47:00):
Exactly.
Rob Collie (00:47:00):
Right. I've seen this evolution on the Excel team over the years
too. There's more and more people on the Excel team who came up not
originally as software engineers, but as people in finance and
things like that. Whereas I was a computer science major that had
to learn Excel in order to work on the Excel team. And so it was,
if you populate a team with nothing but me, back then anyway, you
end up with a team of mechanics who has no idea what it's like to
go into turn three cars ride. I'm using a racing metaphor. I don't
even watch racing. I find it incredibly dull, but I love a good
metaphor though.
Shelly Avery (00:47:40):
Sure. Absolutely. I think Microsoft has done that and is continuing
to expand that industry team, even our president of health and life
sciences comes from the industry. A lot of our leaders from even a
marketing perspective or from a product development perspective,
they're starting to hire from the industry.
Rob Collie (00:48:03):
That's wisdom. That's humility. I think 20 years ago, we would've
probably seen Microsoft put some up and coming computer science
guard in that role. And you still need those people for sure.
Someone who grew writing C++ isn't going to know everything that
they need to know. It's again, there's this whole notion of
collaboration. The thing we keep coming back to. It takes a
lifetime to amass the expertise to be truly good at something.
Rob Collie (00:48:29):
And so, guess what, you're never going to find everything that you
need in one person. You're going to need people with different
histories in order to be successful. And so it's simple. And yet I
don't take it for granted, when I see teams being assembled this
way, I've learned to respect it, that it is a necessary and good
thing. It's always worth praising even if it seems like it's table
stakes. A lot of people don't view it as table stakes. Still,
they've got some things to learn.
Krissy Dyess (00:48:55):
So Teams is empowering, it's a central hub, it's a window into all
these other applications, the Power BI that brings the insights,
the bots, the Power Apps, the drives actions. Tell me a little bit
about the Veeva. I hear about Veeva, that whole human side. Tell me
how you're seeing Veeva start to make its way to help balance, I
think.
Rob Collie (00:49:21):
And what is Veeva?
Krissy Dyess (00:49:21):
Yes. Veeva.
Shelly Avery (00:49:23):
Yeah, sure. Microsoft Veeva is what we have marketed the name of
our employee experience platform. If you're a Microsoft E, you've
probably seen in the past years something in Outlook called
MyAnalytics. MyAnalytics was the very early stages of what is now
Microsoft Veeva. MyAnalytics was a analytics engine that had some
AI in it that would give you insights about your day, or your week,
or your month. It would tell you, "Hey, Shelly, you were meeting
with Krissy like every week for a few weeks and you haven't talked
to her in a while. Do you think it's about time to reach out?" And
then it will even give you a button that says, chat with Krissy
now, or schedule a meeting with Krissy now.
Krissy Dyess (00:50:18):
And I love that.
Shelly Avery (00:50:19):
Yeah. It would pop open your calendar-
Krissy Dyess (00:50:21):
Because I would forget. You have all your lists and you have all
your things. And honestly, when those things would come across, I
was like, "Oh, yeah, you're right." And I was like, wait a minute.
The technology is getting on top of all this stuff that I can't
keep track of. It's amazing.
Shelly Avery (00:50:34):
Yeah. That was the beginning of it. Microsoft also came out with
another tool called Workplace Analytics, which was the next step of
MyAnalytics, where it would anonymize the data and send it to your
manager or to your direct report and it would go up the chain all
the way. So if my manager had 10 people on it, he would get a daily
or weekly report that said, "Hey, your 10 people, this is what
they're doing. They're multitasking in their meetings or they're
working after hours. Hey, maybe you should encourage them to close
the lid of their laptop at night. Let them have better work-life
balance." It provides the manager with insights. Right?
Krissy Dyess (00:51:17):
That's right. Because these are important. This is important to
your overall health of your business, your company, your
culture.
Shelly Avery (00:51:24):
Exactly. So Microsoft Veeva took MyAnalytics and turned it into
what is now called Veeva Insights. And then there is Manager
Insights and Workplace Insights. And so insights is really just a
rebranding and a movement from MyAnalytics in Outlook. And it's now
insight of Microsoft Teams. Because Teams has that developer side
of it, there's so much more that you can do with that information
in Teams than it is within Outlook. And so it gives you nudges also
to set focus time on your calendar or set learning time on your
calendar, and it updates your status, your green, yellow, red, to
focusing or away or things like that. And so it uses AI to help you
know maybe when you're overworking or who you might need to
collaborate with. Recently, Microsoft made a investment with a
meditation company, Headspace.
Krissy Dyess (00:52:30):
Yes. Yes. See, this speaks to me. I love it.
Shelly Avery (00:52:33):
Yeah. It's built into Microsoft Veeva. What I use it for is there's
a feature called your Virtual Commute. We all used to drive in and
drive out of the office and you had, and I forgot about it, but you
had that me time in the car. We could listen to a podcast or veg
out on the radio or something, but it was some me time while you
were in the car, going home from work. And we lost that when we all
went remote. It's like I literally shut my computer and then I walk
in the kitchen and start cooking dinner. It's like, where is that
me time? And so I use the Virtual Commute and I don't use it every
day. It's about a five to seven minute decompression. It says, are
you ready to wrap up your day?
Krissy Dyess (00:53:17):
I need this.
Shelly Avery (00:53:17):
Do you have any last minute emails you need to send? Do you need to
create any to-dos? And it integrates with Microsoft to-dos, so you
can click on things and say, add to my to-do. And then it walks you
through a little meditation. Yeah, Rob's got it on right now.
Krissy Dyess (00:53:38):
This feels amazing. You just took this conversation to a new place
and adding in the music. I'm feeling it. This is just taking work
to a new level.
Rob Collie (00:53:50):
Imagine a world of Raw Data. Data with the human element.
Krissy Dyess (00:53:58):
No, no. Make it come back.
Shelly Avery (00:54:00):
Yeah.
Krissy Dyess (00:54:00):
Oh, no. Can we get that?
Rob Collie (00:54:06):
I couldn't help it.
Krissy Dyess (00:54:08):
No. This is what people need. Honestly, when I heard about this,
and I'm surprised when I say Veeva, people are like, "What's
Veeva?" And I loved your explanation because it gave so much more
detail and history, people need this. Think about like, it gives
tap it into how long you've been sitting and giving you that
balance. This is amazing. Wow. I'm even more excited about
this.
Shelly Avery (00:54:31):
Well, and I think-
Krissy Dyess (00:54:33):
I think I can make it another 50 years in the work environment now,
like [inaudible 00:54:37].
Rob Collie (00:54:37):
I said, that was the plutonium battery that you needed.
Shelly Avery (00:54:41):
Well, and it's so cool because just like there's a Teams team,
there's a Veeva team and they are just getting started. They're
integrating LinkedIn learning into Veeva learning and all these
other learning platforms. So you can learn right in the UI of Teams
and you don't have to single sign on and then MFA and forget your
password to log into all these other learning tools. And it allows
you to share it right inside of Team, say, "Hey, team, I just did
this great learning. I think it'd be great for you."
Shelly Avery (00:55:11):
And customers can upload their own learning modules to it. There's
Veeva topics, which is this Wikipedia where it's self-curated
information. And what is great, like we've talked about acronyms at
Microsoft, every acronym has a topic page now at Microsoft. So
anytime you type an acronym, it hyperlinks it. So I'm chatting you
in Teams and I say FHIR. And it's like, what the heck is FHIR? You
hyperlink it and it gives you an explanation of what FHIR is.
Krissy Dyess (00:55:43):
That's game changer in itself.
Rob Collie (00:55:46):
So, does it also pick up pop culture, like if I type IKR, I know,
right? And someone else doesn't know what that means. Usually I'm
on the receiving end of this. Someone used an acronym yesterday in
a chat with me that I'm sitting there going like, "Oh, what new
hipsters saying is this?" And it turned out, no, no, no, no, no.
That's the customer, Rob.
Krissy Dyess (00:56:08):
Here's something really weird too. I love this Veeva thing. I love
Teams and all this productivity and pulling all the pieces
together. Gosh, back in the day, when I moved from back east to
Phoenix out west and I started working at the company I was with,
they actually had a meditation person that would come in every so
often and they would have us stand up and do exercises. And then
even to just like little chair massages and it all-
Rob Collie (00:56:41):
Please continue.
Krissy Dyess (00:56:42):
Right. Oh, this is just as amazing. I don't even know what track
you got, what meditation track, but I just need this in my day. And
so many other people do.
Rob Collie (00:56:55):
Do you see that? I feel compelled to not even hold the phone
steady. I have to move it in a circle, a very gentle circle as I
play it into the microphone. I didn't even know I was doing
that.
Shelly Avery (00:57:06):
It makes you want to sway.
Rob Collie (00:57:11):
Yeah. In the middle of the meditation music, you heard my reminder
for my next meeting go off. Oh, it really spoiled the mood.
Krissy Dyess (00:57:21):
And you haven't reviewed that 50 page slide deck. And then-
Rob Collie (00:57:25):
That's right.
Krissy Dyess (00:57:26):
Here it goes. Reality comes right back in. You're like, "Oh, okay.
Veeva, Veeva, help me."
Shelly Avery (00:57:32):
I Mean, not to pitch, I'm not selling Veeva anymore. I'm a user of
it, but those are also things it does. It gives you alert in the
beginning of the day that says, "Hey, Shelly, here's what your day
looks like. You got these six meetings. Here's a PowerPoint that
you were working on, that might go with this meeting. Do you need
to review it?" The Outlook team has also built in, I don't know if
you guys have seen this. In Outlook now, you can create 25 minute
meetings, 45 minute meetings or 55 minute meetings that either
start five minutes late or in five minutes early to give that bio
break meeting buffer between meetings.
Krissy Dyess (00:58:14):
That's right.
Shelly Avery (00:58:14):
Because when you're fully remote, all I do is sit around and I
click the join button all day. I need to go refresh my drink, I
need to stand up, I need to stretch. And so, again, we talked about
culture at Microsoft earlier, and Satya has been on multiple news
outlets talking about how we were the customer zero for Veeva and
for this workplace balance. And it's so incredibly crazy to me how
much people care about people. It's what we need to do as a human
race. We just need to care about people more and allowing
technology to play a part in that. It's so cool that we have that.
Hopefully organizations take advantage of it for their employees.
So more people can have ... It's just the little things-
Krissy Dyess (00:59:06):
It is the little things.
Shelly Avery (00:59:06):
You mentioned, Krissy, earlier, it's the little things, like five
minute less meetings. It's a sign of respect. Let me use the
restroom. Don't be mad at me if I'm not on at the top of the hour.
I need two minutes to jump from my last meeting to switch my train
of thought to get into the next one. And I think that it's super
cool that I get to be a part of a company that's offering that to
others. And I hope the rest of the world sees it and gets to take
advantage of it.
Krissy Dyess (00:59:35):
This week, just recently, because I am seeing the five minute grace
period, the meetings start five after, but I just, this week,
because now people are starting to creep in at 10 after. So it's
like everybody expects that five minute because exactly like you
said, you're on back-to-back meetings, you don't get a break, but
now that five minutes, now it's okay if you're 10 minutes after.
Then it's going to be 15. Right?
Rob Collie (00:59:59):
Yeah. It's like back when I used to teach classes, I would tell
people we're going to take a five minute break and we'll resume in
10. Right?
Shelly Avery (01:00:08):
Yeah.
Krissy Dyess (01:00:09):
That's right.
Rob Collie (01:00:10):
But if I tell you it's a 10 minute break, it becomes a 15 minute
break. You can't have that. So just say, "Five minute break, but
I'll see you in 10 minutes."
Krissy Dyess (01:00:17):
When I was training, there was no break. So all my students out
there-
Rob Collie (01:00:20):
You just powered through?
Krissy Dyess (01:00:22):
Because there was so much cool things that I ... I was like, "No
breaks. Let's keep going." And they're looking at me.
Rob Collie (01:00:28):
In the morning, everybody please come in, sit down at a seat that
has a book in front of it. And in the bag next to it, is your
astronaut diapers for the day.
Krissy Dyess (01:00:38):
Don't drink water or you might have to go.
Rob Collie (01:00:41):
Yeah, yeah. We have capitas.
Krissy Dyess (01:00:43):
I was a different person back then. Now I'm embracing the Veeva and
the breaks. I feel sorry for all my students, but that's what I
did, because there was so much cool stuff. No breaks.
Rob Collie (01:00:52):
While we're on this topic, just briefly, this Veeva thing, it seems
like one of those technologies that it's not the only thing like
it, for sure. But it can be used for good, but it could also be
used in a very dark way, if we're not careful. When we were talking
to Jen [Stirrup 01:01:08] on a recent podcast, even dashboards
reports and things can be used as a form of workplace surveillance.
I do see all of the glass half full potential here. Are there any
concerns about customers saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll use this
for the positive, the meditation and the humane," but then they
just turn around and roll it out as like the Amazon horror stories
of the driver's not allowed to take bathroom breaks. And this is a
means of enforcing that.
Shelly Avery (01:01:36):
Yeah. I think there is fear of that. I mean, I know a ton of people
they put duct tape over their cameras and they don't want windows
hello because they think the world's spying on them. There are just
people that have that fear.
Rob Collie (01:01:49):
I don't know any of those.
Shelly Avery (01:01:51):
Yeah. But I think Microsoft is trying to protect customers a little
bit in this area, that you are the only one that can see your data.
Everything else is anonymous. Now, if you're a team of one and you
report to your manager, obviously the manager is going to know it's
you or a team of two, there are those things. But as you go up from
a manager one to an M two, to a director, to a VP, and then all the
way up to HR, unless you're a very, very small company, the data is
segregated into demographics, and geographies, and departments, and
roles, and skills, and tenure. And they slice and dice that data to
learn insights as to how one population is performing or working
over another population.
Shelly Avery (01:02:42):
I think it was one engineering group at Microsoft that was really,
really being overworked. Not that they weren't all being
overworked. I'm sure everybody is overworked in every position at
every company everywhere. But there was this one in particular
organization at Microsoft, I think they were putting in like 18
hour days. It was ridiculous. And the feedback they got from these
individuals was, "We have to work after hours because we are in
meetings all day." And they were individual contributor. They were
coders. They needed that three to four hours to get that line of
code written or tested or whatever.
Shelly Avery (01:03:17):
They made a meeting free Wednesdays. They literally wouldn't allow
people to have meetings. Now you could collaborate with people and
set your own, but no internal or manager type meetings those days.
And the productivity of that group after three or four months, just
completely changed. And so using the data, that's what the data is
meant to be there for. Now, there are people in the world that are
just going to make Ponzi schemes. They're just evil people. Data
can be used, I'm sure in malicious ways. I think Microsoft is
trying their best to make it so they can't be super micromanagement
at least down to the individual level.
Rob Collie (01:04:02):
It's a certainly a very, very challenging frontier for a technology
company, right? We're going there as an industry. It's inevitable.
It's happening. There's no point in trying to say, "Oh, no, let's
put up the firewall here." We're seeing this thing. This goes back
to my original, something I said a long time ago in this discussion
about how certain things don't go through a computer very well. I
think this is one of those examples. We're seeing it with Facebook
and YouTube. Technology companies, they're in the position now,
these companies, of being the arbiters of truth and there's no
algorithm.
Rob Collie (01:04:36):
There's actually a really great YouTube video, or this one guy in
the UK talks about, there is no algorithm for truth, but we've
created these platforms that are the primary disseminators of
information in the world and they're completely and forever ill
equipped to be arbiter of truth. Wow, look at the world that we're
in. So, I don't think this particular topic is on that scale. It
doesn't have that same reach. I don't think as the other things,
but I think it's a cousin of those problems in some ways. It's a
more solvable problem, I think, than the Facebook and YouTube
problem that we're seeing. But this is where the real stuff is. Is
like, how do we deploy these things in a way that is a net benefit
to humanity? And not just as a net benefit to shareholders.
Shelly Avery (01:05:27):
Exactly.
Rob Collie (01:05:28):
That's attention, especially I think in the United States. It's a
very different dynamic like in Europe, for instance. I can imagine
the adoption profile of something like Veeva in Europe will be very
different than in the USA.
Shelly Avery (01:05:40):
Well, it will have to meet European standards. European has GDPR
around privacy laws. And so there might be different settings or
features that can or can't be enabled in a product like Veeva in UK
or in Europe to comply with those.
Rob Collie (01:05:58):
A lot of consumer products in the United States, they have to meet
California standards.
Shelly Avery (01:06:03):
Exactly.
Rob Collie (01:06:04):
And then because of that, the whole country is California in terms
of its standards, because you're manufacturing product. Software's
a little different, it can be tuned differently in different
places. Shelly, I have really enjoyed this conversation and thank
you so much for making the time. You also get a gif of yourself.
Why don't have to be mentioned that.
Krissy Dyess (01:06:19):
A G-I-F not G-I-F-T. Gif.
Rob Collie (01:06:22):
Right. Not a gift, but it is a gift-
Krissy Dyess (01:06:24):
It's a gift or a gif.
Rob Collie (01:06:29):
Or a gif. Yeah.
Shelly Avery (01:06:29):
Yay. Fun.
Rob Collie (01:06:29):
Yeah.
Krissy Dyess (01:06:29):
And you could frame it.
Rob Collie (01:06:29):
It needs to be a movable frame. We could sell it as an NFT.
Shelly Avery (01:06:32):
Yeah.
Rob Collie (01:06:37):
And I also want to say, I really, really, really detected just a
tremendous amount of wisdom in you, in this conversation. And
that's not something that you necessarily run into all of the time
in technology, but I think there's something about the way that you
approach problems, the way that you think about them, that I find
very valuable and special. And I wanted to make sure that I said
that before wrapped up. So, thanks for being here. Yeah. And thanks
for bringing your perspective, which I really appreciated it.
Shelly Avery (01:07:04):
Thanks so much guys.
Announcer (01:07:05):
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!