Breaking Free from the Tyranny of the Deliverable with Andrew Welch

[00:00:00] Andrew Welch: This is a form of what I've called the Tyranny of the Deliverable. Right? So the Tyranny of the Deliverable is this phenomenon that happens when, first of all, IT organizations organize themselves into teams that are clustered around specific silos of technology.

[00:00:23] Neil Benson: G'day, and welcome to Amazing Apps. I'm your host, Neil Benson. Whether you've joined me before, or maybe this is your first time here, a very warm welcome to you. My guest today on the show is Andrew Welch. Andrew is a Chief Technology Officer at HSO, and his role is to advise customers on their big strategic technology bets.

And he's well placed, given his background in IT strategy with the US Coast Guard, and in his prior consulting roles. He's an author, a Microsoft MVP, and a regular community and conference presenter. If you're an IT leader, architect, consultant, you'll learn a lot from Andrew's perspectives on the importance of IT leadership, cloud ecosystems, data platforms, artificial intelligence, and the future of innovation in technology.

Visit https://amazingapps.show/149 where you'll find links to Andrew's social media and his blog, Cloud Lighthouse. Let's meet Andrew Welch.

Andrew, welcome to Amazing Apps. It's fantastic to have you on the show. I'm a longtime fan. I love some of the work that you've been doing, and I know you're a best friend to CIOs on both sides of the Atlantic. How's it going?

[00:01:36] Andrew Welch: Well, I mean, you know, there's nothing like, nothing like a podcast to make you feel way better about yourself than you did before it started. So this is already going great. Thank you. Thanks, Neil.

[00:01:46] Neil Benson: You've been doing a lot of work recently and sharing a lot of your, your thinking with us around how CIOs and technology leaders in particular should approach digital transformation, not just from a workload perspective. Hey, I've got this application I need to digitize, but try to encourage us to take a more holistic approach.

Do you want to share with us some of the highlights of your recent work?

[00:02:09] Andrew Welch: Yeah, yeah, sure. This is, this is a, clearly a favorite topic of mine lately, and, let's think about why, why why do CIOs need at this particular moment in the evolution of the, the technology? Why does so much of this need to be CIO led?

And I think that, you know, over the last several years and, and really for as far back as the, certainly the cloud is concerned, but really, you know, modern information technology a lot of efforts, they've been very implementation focused and they've often been driven by the particular stakeholders who needed the thing.

So the marketing department needed marketing automation and the CFO needed finance capabilities. What's happening now is that we've really made a, we've made a break, a transition into the, the era of ecosystem, of cloud ecosystems, of cloud ecosystem architecture. 

And ecosystem is a word that gets thrown around very easily by a lot of people. So I find that it increasingly means something different to everyone who, who uses it. The bottom line is that. These technologies are not easily implementable in in isolation of one another. So if you look at AI, for example, and that's everyone's favorite acronym, right? But if you look at AI capabilities, people are super obsessed with the AI workload, the shiny thing, right?

But the fact is, is that none of it works if you have not built a proper modern data platform sitting underneath of it, so because this interconnectedness among different technical components of a typical cloud ecosystem, this is something that really needs to be led at an executive level, and there needs to be some really good air traffic control, I think, around what lands in the ecosystem, how it fits in pieces together or you're just never going to get to the kind of value that you're hoping for.

[00:04:10] Neil Benson: I've met my customer recently who has some Dynamics here, got Snowflake over there as a, as a data warehouse. They've got some, I can't remember the integration platform they got. They've got Adobe customer data platform, got Microsoft customer insights over here. They've got Zendesk for taking customer calls.

I'm like, how did you end up with this landscape? And they're like, well, we just focused on one thing at a time. There was a solution architect for each of those things. Projects, and now we've come up for air and, oh, maybe we should have had an enterprise architect taking a much bigger picture look at this thing because they've ended up with a bit of a mess.

Do you see that kind of scenario played out in quite a lot of organizations?

[00:04:49] Andrew Welch: Yeah, I do. And I think that I actually was just having this conversation with someone about the role of that enterprise architect. And I even think that enterprise architects will tend to be very focused, at least in my experience, on a solution architect is focused on a specific workload, an enterprise architect gets very focused on maybe four or five workloads. Often very focused on core business systems. So, how will our ERP interact with our marketing automation, interact with our CRM or our sales situation. So enterprise architects, there are some very talented enterprise architects out there, but I almost think that what's really called for here, and before we insert another brand of architect into the mix, but it's this idea of whatever you call it, the cloud strategist, right?

What is our IT driven strategy for building capabilities that are going to piece together correctly and drive value for the business? And I think that that's a very different remit, a very different scope than what most enterprise architects and certainly what most solution architects are really focused on.

[00:06:02] Neil Benson: It's great if you have no cloud and you've got a cloud strategist whose job it is to design everything from a greenfield perspective. The world in reality is a lot messier than that. There's multiple cloud workloads already in place. Do you see customers wanting to pursue a multi cloud strategy from some kind of resilience point of view. Like let's have a little bit of Azure, a little bit of AWS, a little bit of Google, so that if one goes down, the other two are still there and we haven't brought the entire enterprise crashing down. Or do you see people concentrating on the Microsoft stack because of its better value and breadth of services?

[00:06:39] Andrew Welch: I tend to think that the rationale for multi cloud that goes, basically, as you've said, you know, we want to diversify in case one of the clouds goes down. I've come to think of that as a rather silly justification for being multi cloud. I think that there are some, some probably decent justifications out there for being multi cloud, but one of them is not that one of the world's largest, most valuable mission critical companies is all of a sudden going to go down.

That strikes me very much as we're superimposing yesterday's problems around the health of our data center on today's technology, which I think is pretty silly. You know, we could, we could rip the lid off of this, but

[00:07:24] Neil Benson: Microsoft had a period where they would forget to renew SSL certificates and silly things like that that would cause things to come crashing down for thousands of customers, but I think they've got their act together these days.

[00:07:35] Andrew Welch: you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a little better. It's a little better.

[00:07:38] Neil Benson: Whenever people are approaching the cloud strategy, should they take a look at all the Microsoft services? Or do you still see them blending in offerings from other cloud providers? Do you think Microsoft's got enough of a lead in all of the different services that you could just rely on the Microsoft stack?

[00:07:55] Andrew Welch: Yeah. So I, I went through this, recently, with a fairly in depth look at Power Platform versus OutSystems, okay? And, and which, which technology is better for which purpose? And I'll spare you the many hours of discussion and research and looking at this and, and just say that what I learned from this is that Microsoft's strategy. 

Microsoft, remember, at its core is a platform company, which has always made if you are a business applications person, has always made business applications within the Microsoft realm a little bit of an outlier, right, because Dynamics, those are applications that do specific things, which is kind of contrary and against the grain of what I think Microsoft's real DNA is.

So that's not to say that they aren't fantastic solutions, but they are a little bit a bit of an outlier in the Microsoft world. 

Microsoft's entire strategy, right, has been to build components, technical services that are interoperable with one another. And in early days, it's sort of a micro services architecture to the extreme, right?

And if you want to think of, you know, some of these, some of these... If you want to think of Power Automate as a kind of certain brand of microservice, that's a reasonable analogy, but, Microsoft's strategy has very much been to build, to put a lot of different technical services out there in the marketplace and then allow developers to mix and match them in a way that makes sense for the particular organization that they're serving. 

Which is very different going back to the OutSystems analogy, right?

OutSystems is a very, very coherent product. It's a very coherent studio product that allows you to do everything that OutSystems lets you do pretty much from the one studio. If what you want as an organization is to be able to use and repurpose these very small in some cases, technical service building blocks across your ecosystem, then Microsoft is the way to go.

If what you want is to really effectively put together larger building blocks, so you want to take Workday and snap Workday and alongside SAP and snap SAP and alongside Salesforce, alongside productivity services from Google or cloud infrastructure from Amazon. That's, that's an approach. It's an approach that, you know, I certainly wouldn't advocate. I really believe in all the stuff that I say when it comes to Microsoft but, you know, yeah, I see it a lot. I see it a lot.

[00:10:37] Neil Benson: I do too. And I think that's the reality that there's always a vendor who appears stronger in the marketplace at a given point in time. Some organizations when they're making their evaluations, choose that vendor at that particular time because of relationships, because of capability or because of cost or some other reason.

 I'm kind of surprised that some of the vendors. Oracle doesn't seem to be making much of a dent these days. They're making, still making tons of money, but I think it's a lot of legacy licensing driving that. Our good friend, James Phillips has popped up at Google Cloud. It was the most recent announcement I saw on LinkedIn this morning.

Be interesting to see what kind of impact he has there. What do you make of that one?

[00:11:11] Andrew Welch: I was having lunch with my wife today and you know, she works for Microsoft. And so we, we hear Microsoft in stereo at our own dinner table. And I told her, I said, Hey, did you, did you see that James Phillips is now the VP of Google Cloud.

And you know, we sort of muse, I wonder what it would be like to work for Google, to work for AWS, for whatever. And I said, you know, I don't think I could. 

And it goes back to what I said a moment ago, that when I stand in front of a client, or when I sit down with the CIO and I tell them, here are the benefits of the Microsoft cloud, the Microsoft platform approach. I'm not saying that because I'm paid to say that. I'm saying that because I really believe it, right? I'm, I'm really geeked out about this stuff and I, I truly believe that the Microsoft approach is the superior approach to cloud technology at this point in time. So. 

Yeah, you know, I have a lot of respect for James Phillips but I would miss Microsoft if I were not steeped in Microsoft.

[00:12:13] Neil Benson: Yeah, I don't know other platforms as well as you might do, but yeah, I feel the same way. I've been working alongside Microsoft for a long time, and I'm finally... Well, I shouldn't say that, but I'm getting to the point I'm really proud of the capabilities that they've got. Sometimes it was a few rough edges and we had to try and skirt around those, but they've got a really great set of capabilities today that a lot of organizations are making use of and you know, and getting a lot of value from.

Long may it last. I think there's plenty of depth and breadth in the Microsoft leadership as it stands today. 

[00:12:42] Andrew Welch: The one thing, my one exception to this is that you can pry my, my MacBook out of my cold, dead fingers. I just got a new, these new MacBook Air 15 inch. It's a beautiful machine. Maybe the most beautiful laptop I've ever had, but it is maddening, right?

When I go to a conference or I'm in the office or whatever, and I'm showing a colleague something and they reach out and they want to touch my screen. I'm like, no, no, no, you can't, don't touch, don't touch my screen. This is my one non Microsoft indulgence, right? I love this thing.

[00:13:12] Neil Benson: It's got a beautiful trackpad but the screen don't work, yeah?

[00:13:16] Andrew Welch: Yeah, exactly. But I don't want you touching my screen. I don't want to touch my own screen. I don't, especially don't want you touching my screen. So, yeah, you know, to each their own.

[00:13:25] Neil Benson: Yeah. Fair enough. I, you know, everybody's got their the least favorite child in the portfolio. You mentioned Power Automate a few moments ago. That's just, I cannot, I cannot bring myself to love Power Automate. 

[00:13:36] Andrew Welch: You know, it's been a while since I, I sat down and, you know, knocked out my own, my own app, from scratch, you know, like hands on keyboard end to end but in the category of things that at one point in time they could pry out of my cold, dead fingers were the classic the classic CRM workflows.

Those, I did not give those up easily. But let me, let me turn it around on you actually, Neil. What is your favorite Microsoft technical service or product that you think not getting enough attention. I mean, what's, what's the thing you're really geeked out on that if you were telling folks, Hey, go learn as much as you can about this, because it's going to be really important to you.

[00:14:18] Neil Benson: Oh,

[00:14:19] Andrew Welch: not used to being interviewed on your

[00:14:20] Neil Benson: no, no, I am not. Thank you. Thank you for that. I'm sure my editor is going to have a field day cutting out my ums and ahs as I flounder around. There are, there are certain gaps in, in just the everyday productivity stuff. 

There's a new Teams app experience and a new Outlook app experience.

They're kind of in preview. You can toggle them on and off within your tenant. Those are both really nice. Because one of the biggest gaps I had is I, you might sympathize with this as well, I run two businesses, Customery and Superware. And I am very lucky to be invited to have user accounts in many of my customers tenants, and I have my personal mailbox.

And so I end up with... 5, 6, 7 mailboxes and 5, 6, 7 Microsoft accounts in Teams and try to switch between those and figure out what's next in my day is maddening. I use some third party software to bring it together, but the new Outlook app is much, much better at bringing that together so I can get a calendar snap in on the right hand side of my mailbox, makes it much easier.

Very few people in Redmond have as many identities as folks outside Redmond, particularly in the consulting industry. I don't think they've got any empathy for folks like me and maybe like you, who've got multiple identities and trying to get through our day. 

What would I encourage new folks coming into the industry to focus on? You know, I've got a 10 year old and an 8 year old who are both starting to, to grasp what it is that I do trying to get some experience and play with computers and stuff. And it'd be really interesting to see where their careers go. Will the people who know how to use AI forge ahead in their careers? 

Or will AI replace everybody's career? I think we're at a really interesting inflection point. I don't have a strong opinion on that yet. We'll see where that unfolds over the next couple of years. Do you think AI is going to eat the world?

[00:16:08] Andrew Welch: I think that... It is going to eat the world in a much more subtle than what I think most people, most people expect way. I'm working right now on an AI strategy or at least guidance to the CIOs that I work with as to how we can frame together their, the AI strategy for their organization.

One of the things that, that I tell them right now is that we're in such early days with AI that none, none of us really know exactly where it's going to go. So therefore, the best investments that you can make in AI, and this kind of gets us back to the original premise of the conversation, the best investment that you can make in AI today is, an investment that is going to deliver value to the organization outside of the AI workload itself.

So that's a mouthful, so let me, let me explain. In order to make AI work, you have to consolidate data, you have to consolidate your enterprise data into storage technology that AI can actually, that cognitive, say, in the Microsoft world, that cognitive search can index, and that AI can then turn around and use.

That's a really good investment, because yes, it's going to pay off, that data consolidation and the data readiness, the governance of your data, the hygiene, the quality of your data, the lineage of your data. These are excellent investments to make right now, because one, we know that they are going to make AI workloads more accessible to the organization, even though we don't exactly know what those workloads are, but they're also going to make analytical workloads, say, reporting and deriving insights from your data and turning that data into an asset and delivering that data to other downstream workloads, say via an API to folks outside of your tenant, et cetera.

Those are great investments because we can identify value for them, even if the specific thing you have in mind for AI that might seem magical or fanciful doesn't work out. So one of my litmus tests right now for, is this a good AI investment, is: What value does it offer that has nothing to do with AI?

And if you can define that value, you're probably making a better investment than saying, I want to invest in magic tricks and hope that something cool comes out of it later.

[00:18:32] Neil Benson: I love that. So, sort out your data, and then from there, you'll be able to generate insights. You can't generate insights until you've sorted out your data. And I think making those data investments, like you said, in hygiene, in quality, in lineage, in consolidation and aggregation, organizations have been putting off for as long as they can.

It's, it's ugly, hard work and thankless. But if you can now use that as a bedrock for applying cognitive services and generating those insights, people will love you for it, but it's tough that data consolidation piece, but hopefully AI will, will drive the necessity for it.

[00:19:08] Andrew Welch: Most of my work nowadays is directly with the CIO in one of my client organizations, and I, I'm thinking of a few CIOs who put off building a proper data platform within their organization and now are super into it, right, because previously it seemed hard and it seemed kind of mundane and it seemed like, let's focus on the workload.

So, to the extent that AI has gotten people excited about and committed to doing things they should have done years ago, that's already a win before you even get to the magic tricks that AI may or may not be able to do.

[00:19:45] Neil Benson: I think there's a core capability required, organizations need to be able to experiment more. Far too many times, projects have to have robust business cases and a sponsor and, you know, big budget in order to go ahead. And I think we, somewhere along the way, have lost the ability just to give a small team a couple of weeks just to go and run some experiments. We seem to have lost that. And we're so stretched these days. Everybody has to be assigned to a project. Your time sheet has to be, you know, filled with a hundred percent billable time. That we, we don't seem to have that capability just to, to experiment and play with this stuff. Do you see that in the organizations you're working with as well?

[00:20:26] Andrew Welch: Yeah, so this is a, this is a form of what I've called the Tyranny of the Deliverable, right? So the Tyranny of the Deliverable is this phenomenon that happens when first of all, IT organizations organize themselves into teams that are clustered around specific silos of technology. So you have the data services team, and you have the app dev team, and you have the RPA team, and you have the infrastructure team, and on and on it goes. 

And, unsurprisingly, when you take a basket of requirements, and you give it to one of those teams. Say you take a basket of requirements, and you give it to your RPA team, you are going to get a thing made out of RPA, even if RPA is not the actual proper solution to the problem. 

And this It becomes more insidious when budgeting, as it happens in most IT organizations, budgeting gets tied to those baskets of requirements, right?

Because now you've created the incentives. I'm really into non technical incentives and how that drives good or bad technical decisions right now. You now have created the incentive for the team to check off the deliverable that you gave them, regardless of whether it's useful, regardless of whether it works, regardless of whether it's the correct solution to the problem. They want to check that deliverable off so that they can justify having the same budget or more budget next year. 

And this is how it works in IT organizations the world over. And it is frankly wrong. And it is increasingly counterproductive not just for the reasons I just described, but also because it prevents the kind of blue sky thinking that you've just described.

I was mulling this over for a long time, and then and I hope, I don't misrepresent him here but then, out of the sky dropped Steve Mourdue's subscription as a service model, and I thought to myself, this is it, this is the answer!

[00:22:30] Neil Benson: Of all the people, Steve Mordue?

[00:22:32] Andrew Welch: Of all the people, of all the people, but yeah, I think that the more consultancies and the more end customers can move away from charging by the hour, screwing around with fixed scope spelled out in statements of work that require loads of management overhead in order to prepare and to execute and then they get very, very rigid and people get, you know, that's not really in scope.

[00:23:02] Neil Benson: Oh, we've got a change request coming up for you.

[00:23:05] Andrew Welch: those, those old sorts of practices are just killing our ability across the economy and across the world of technology to innovate. They're killing us and they are relics of another time and they should be left there because there are better ways of doing things today.

[00:23:24] Neil Benson: Very good. And if people want to catch up with you, have you got any conference presentations or anything coming up? I noticed you're promoting the next user group meeting for the UK user group, is that when you're going to? It's normally in London. It's a whole day event, I think they normally throw in London.

[00:23:39] Andrew Welch: So, yeah, so, so the UK, the UK user group, it's extraordinarily well run, and there's always great content, great sessions. So they do a quarterly all day in person, usually at Microsoft's Paddington office. There's a brewing white paper. That I'm working on with some Microsoft folks on this topic of ecosystem architecture. And then the next in person that we're doing, I think, will be Nordic Summit in late September, I want to say, the last weekend in September in Copenhagen, which is a beautiful city and of course, Nordic Summit, if you want to think about just top rate, top, top shelf organizers, those guys put on a brilliant event. I love Nordic Summit a lot.

[00:24:23] Neil Benson: So my wife is half Danish, half Australian, and I've been to Copenhagen many times to visit her family and things, and I love it there. If I wasn't going to Vegas for Power Platform Conference, I would have tried to make some kind of excuse to visit Copenhagen this year. Can't do both, but I would love to have seen you there.

I will put links in the show notes to those events and your white paper or at least to your blog, where the white paper, I'm sure, will be announced, and to the Nordic Summit as well. Good luck with those presentations, hope they go well. Thanks so much for joining me.

[00:24:51] Andrew Welch: Thank you. Thanks, Neil. This has been great. Really great.

[00:24:54] Neil Benson: Thanks for joining me today, Andrew. I appreciate you joining us. 

Andrew is co presenting five strategies for integrating Power Platform and the Azure Data Platform with Anna Ademany at the Nordic Summit on Saturday the 23rd of September in Copenhagen. This show will go live in mid September, so if you get your skates on, you can get a ticket for Nordic Summit.

Or you can usually catch up with Andrew at the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform London user group events. I think he's going to be at their meeting on the 7th of November in the Microsoft offices in Paddington. You'll find links to those events and other resources, Andrew's social media and blog at https://amazingapps.show/149, if you're listening to the podcast, or down below in the description if you're following along on YouTube. Until next time, keep experimenting.