Raw Data By P3 Adaptive

Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is a people-centric data podcast hosted by Rob Collie, Founder/CEO of P3 Adaptive, a Premier Microsoft Power Platform Partner. Rob and his guests share entertaining stories as well as insights, expertise, and anecdotal stories about Business Intelligence, the Power platform, and the world of data . . . with the human element. More of a casual conversation, this podcast exemplifies P3 Adaptive/s “mullet” approach: business in the front, party in the back!

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What We Learned at the Fabric Conference 04/16/2024

A Framework for Spotting Legitimate AI Use Cases 04/09/2024

"Hallucination" is Just a Fancy Word for Being Wrong 04/02/2024

Adjacent and Between: Demystifying Digital Transformation with Power Apps and Power Automate 03/26/2024

Adjacent and Between: Demystifying Digital Transformation with Power Apps and Power Automate Everyone talks about digital transformation, but it seems like no one really explains what it means... until now. In today's episode, Rob and Justin dive deep to cut through the buzzwords and lay out the reality. They're tackling why digital transformation isn't about making huge, instant changes but rather about the smart, subtle tweaks in areas that usually get ignored but badly need a digital lift. They dive into how leveraging tools like the Power Platform can spark significant improvements, showing that it's the small changes that can really boost efficiency and smooth out your workflow. Ever found yourself wondering how to translate all the chatter about digital evolution into actionable steps? That's exactly what Rob and Justin are unpacking. They're guiding you through how minor, yet clever adjustments can transform your processes. It's all about enhancing the routine, one step at a time. And, as always, if you enjoyed the episode, be sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform to help new listeners find us. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: Rob Collie (00:00): Hello, friends. In today's episode, Justin and I demystify what is meant by the phrase digital transformation. Phrases like that are one of my least favorite things. Why do I say that? Well, these are phrases that get used a lot. They cast a big shadow. You encounter them almost anywhere you go. That's fine by itself. But in the case of digital transformation, that massive shadow is multiplied by no one understanding what it actually means. (00:30): Now earlier in my career, I used to be really intimidated by things like this. Everyone seems to know what this means because they're using it all the time. I don't know what it means, so should I just pretend and play along like everyone else? But at some point, many years ago, I had this moment where I realized that the Emperor has no clothes. It almost never has clothes. Now when I encounter phrases like this, instead of being like paralyzed or intimidated, I instead start working in my own definition and this process takes time. I've been picking apart and stewing on the definition of digital transformation now for probably the better part of a year plus. Somewhere along the way in that process, I realized that we at P3 are doing quite a bit of digital transformation work, I just hadn't realized it yet because I didn't have a good enough definition. (01:18): Lately, I've been noticing that my definition for digital transformation has reached a steady state. It's not changing over time anymore, which tends to be my signal that I've arrived at a definition that works. Now seemed like a good time to sit down and compare notes with Justin, who's been following his own parallel process of arriving at a definition. I'm very pleased with where we landed. A practical and specific definition that can be reduced to practice with an almost paint-by-numbers type of approach. (01:47): If you asked someone for a definition of something like digital transformation, and by the time they're done giving you their definition, you can't practically boil that down to what it means for you, that's not a problem with you, that's a problem with the definition. A lot of times, people's definitions for terms like this are almost like deliberately vague, as a means of projecting power, as a means of actually controlling you. You'll get a lot of definitions that are engineered to sound smart, engineered to sound authoritative, but not engineered to provide anything resembling clarity. Because if you sound smart, and you sound authoritative but you leave your audience hungry, you create a feeling of dependency. Folks, I just think that's yucky. That's just gross. (02:35): To show you what I mean, I just ran the Google search, "What does digital transformation mean?" The very top hit, enterprisersproject.com, defines digital transformation as "the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business resulting in fundamental changes to help businesses operate in how they deliver value to customers." Did that clear it up? Nope. Boiling that one down, it sounds a lot like you should use computers and use them to make changes. But it sounds smart, sounds authoritative. (03:06): Here's the second result from our old favorite, McKinsey. McKinsey defines digital transformation as "the process of developing organizational and technology based capabilities that allow a company to continuously improve its customer experience and lower its unit costs, and over time sustain a competitive advantage." All right, so that one sounds like McKinsey is almost starting with that original definition and adding additional value to it. They're saying use computers to improve, and to make money, and to compete. If you have $1 million to spend, you can get advice like that. (03:43): All right, with those two definitions, we don't even need an episode. We can just skip it? Because everyone knows exactly what they're talking about. These are the top two hits on Google, folks. Useless. Part of the reason these definitions are useless, again, is because they're designed to be useless. But I also think though, that a lot of times you hear definitions like this is because the people writing them actually cannot boil them down. By the time you come up with a truly useful definition, or a framework, or a guide for understanding a topic like this, it almost by its definition, it's not going to sound nearly as sexy, nearly as smart. It's going to sound relatively simple, mundane. But those are the valuable definitions, the ones that we can actually apply, that make a difference in how we actually view our own business. (04:29): That's what we set out to do in this episode. I think we succeeded, came up with a very practical, applicable definition that you'll never find on McKinsey's website. Let's get into it. Speaker 2 (04:42): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? Speaker 4 (04:46): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast, with your host, Rob Collie, and your cohost, Justin Mannhardt. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (05:12): Justin, one of the things that we really like to do, I really like to do, I think you do as well, is to take a phrase or topic, and demystify it. Especially phrases that you hear repeated over, and over, and over again, and everyone has to pretend that they understand what they mean. But even when they do, they often have very different pictures in their heads. (05:33): One that I think is due for a treatment, and we've hinted at it once before on this podcast but not with any depth, is digital transformation. What does it mean? Justin Mannhardt (05:45): What does it mean, what does it not mean, all parts in between. Rob Collie (05:50): Starting with the places where I hear it. I often hear it in the context of this is something that's already done. The big talking head analysts at places like Gartner- Justin Mannhardt (06:00): Yeah. Rob Collie (06:00): Will talk about it like it's in the rearview mirror. "The shift to digital, the pivot to digital has forced the following things," so has forced, it's a past tense thing. Which further underlines the idea that well, if it's already happened, clearly everyone knows what it means. They don't stop to define it, they're just tossing that aside as a means of getting to the next point. I find that to be one of the most troubling habits of the talking heads. (06:28): The first few times I encountered this phrase, I didn't really know what it meant. I imagined that it meant switching to ecommerce from brick-and-mortar. Justin Mannhardt (06:37): Yeah. Rob Collie (06:37): I didn't even realize that that was the impression I had, it was just this vague feeling in the back of my head. Justin Mannhardt (06:42): The word digital, I'm just thinking about this now because a lot of times, you'll look at one of these diagrams, it's like, "Your digital transformation wheel includes all these things." You'll see something like, "Move to the cloud." I'm like, "Okay, were the servers with the software, was that software analog or something?" Rob Collie (06:59): Yeah, we've been digital for a long time, right? Justin Mannhardt (07:01): Yeah. Rob Collie (07:01): Most broadly defined, you could say that the digital transformation really got going with the adoption of the PC. Justin Mannhardt (07:09): Right. Rob Collie (07:10): That was when digital transformation started. In the sense that it started in the 1980s, maybe it is something worth talking about somewhat in the rearview mirror, but that's not what they mean. They don't mean the adoption of the PC. Justin Mannhardt (07:23): No. But it's interesting, when you think about the timeline of technology evolution. People say, "Oh, you described it as past tense." Digital transformation has occurred in en masse in market. Now today, it's like AI is here, en masse in market. But the pace at which new things are coming out, what's really happening is just the long tail is longer back to where companies were at in this journey. It's not like the entire industrial complex has been collectively moving to the modern current state across the board. There's companies that are still running SQL 2000, that's their production world still. This isn't something that's happened. Rob Collie (08:09): I think that the big talking head analysts often tend to really only talk about the most elite sub-strata of even their own clients. When they talk about this as something that's completely done, even most of Gartner's paying clients, I would suspect, aren't anywhere close to done. But we still haven't really started talking about what it actually means. (08:32): Let's say it is not the switch from paper and pencil systems to electronic line-of-business systems. Not only do we have the PC, and that's been long since mainstreamed, the notion of line-of-business software, server based software, whether cloud or otherwise, line-of-business software is also I think incredibly well entrenched. We're done with having key business systems running in a manual format. That's long since rearview. That also isn't what they mean by digital transformation. (09:07): Of course, both of those are digital and they were huge transformations, but that's not the digital transformation we're talking about. It's anything that's happened after that. Justin Mannhardt (09:15): Yeah. Rob Collie (09:16): It's a lot harder to pin down the things that happened after that. Justin Mannhardt (09:20): In general, I agree with you because the big blocks, software, the availability of the cloud, not having intensive paper process in most companies, that's largely been accomplished. To different levels, of course. Then, what's left? What's the definition? What are we trying to do? Rob Collie (09:41): Well, if you think of the line-of-business application and the PC, the PC interfaces with all the line-of-business apps. I would say that, and even this is not 100% true, but I would say that the conversion to digital systems is complete, or complete-ish. Justin Mannhardt (09:59): Okay. Rob Collie (09:59): When you look at your business as individual silos. Justin Mannhardt (10:03): Say more. You've got a digital environment for finance, digital environment for sales, is that what you mean? Rob Collie (10:09): Yeah. Core workflows have largely been digital for a while. All the workflows that take place between systems, or the workflows that take place adjacent to a system, those are the things that we're talking about when we talk about digital transformation, going after those workflows. (10:30): Everything we've been doing in the world of business software since at least the 1980s has been digital transformation. Justin Mannhardt (10:38): Yeah. Rob Collie (10:39): But our digital transformation, we're really talking about at least the third chapter. It's not chapter one or two. It's like the next frontier, identifying and going after a new class of workflows that would benefit from essentially software support. Justin Mannhardt (10:56): Right. Rob Collie (10:56): Okay. Now because almost by definition, just by subtraction ... We're saying, "Look, we've got the PC, we've got the line-of-business systems that handle the core workflows within a silo. What's left?" Well, it's almost like a perfect mathematical proof. What's left is the stuff between and outside. (11:14): Given that everyone's mix of line-of-business systems is, I like to say, best of breed, meaning random. It's whatever we decided at the time. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Legacy. Justin Mannhardt (11:25): Yeah. Rob Collie (11:26): You're never going to have anything off-the-shelf that helps you solve the workflows. The middleware problem between your systems is always going to be a custom solution. (11:38): We should give examples of these. When I said outside or adjacent to, there's even workflows that they're not really between systems, they're just the offline portion of working with the system. I'm thinking about a budgeting process, for instance. The world's first budgeting systems were mostly there to record your budget that you enter into it. As those budgeting systems have gotten better, they've included more and more of the human workflow that goes into creating, and evaluating, and kicking the tires before it's finalized. Those offline human workflows, getting more and more structured about them, can make a huge difference. Justin Mannhardt (12:19): Not just structured, Rob, more tightly integrated with the adjacent system itself. I like that adjacency, because if you have a financial system where your budget or your forecast lives, there's a martialing of activity, analysis, input. Then you say, "Okay, we need to get it look like this," and then we put it in the thing. What happens in that processes, you get all sorts of scattered iterations of ideas and it gets loose. But if you could have all that iteration tight, the final submission is already handled or much easier. Rob Collie (12:51): Yeah. Sticking with the budgeting example for a moment, it still echoes one of the themes I mentioned for the between systems, the between silos case. Which is that one-size-fits-all systems, off-the-shelf systems, they really struggle to address all the nuances of your particular business. It's very, very difficult. The more, and more, and more you try to get the offline processes, the human processes brought into the digital workflow, the more an off-the-shelf software package is going to struggle. It's getting further and further away from the safety of the core of the task. (13:28): This is why the Power Platform approach to budgeting and planning is often, in fact almost always, a more effective, in terms of cost-effective, time effective, results effective. The core libraries for doing all of the things that you need to do are basically already there and it's inherently designed to be customizable. Justin Mannhardt (13:48): And very nimble. Even the big players in FP&A software, they're not that great, in our opinion, at the end of the day. But the price points just exclude anybody that's not a very sizeable, formidable company. You're not looking to spend that kind of money if you're even a few hundred million a year type operation. You're just not going to sign up to that agreement. You are left with a middleware type of a problem, that you're either solving with spreadsheets, pen and paper, or something else. Our platform can slide right in there. Rob Collie (14:26): Of course, there is a huge advantage to performing a "digital transformation" on a process like that because the human, offline, pen and paper, sending random emails, getting answers, tracking them, it's incredibly tedious, it's incredibly error-prone. Just super, super slow. It's not like you can perform many iterations. You're not even really going to be able to pull off one iteration and you call it good. But you're just going to miss so much. The budget could have been so much better. If you've got a bad budget, of course you're going to pay for that later. (14:58): That's the adjacent case. Let's talk about the between a little bit as well. What's an example of a workflow that would span across different line-of-business systems but require a human being essentially, or humans, to essentially carry the buckets of water between those different pipes? Justin Mannhardt (15:18): We'll make up a company today, Rob, we'll start a new company and it's going to be called I Manufacture Things, Inc. Hey. At I Manufacture Things, Inc., I've got a sales team. Rob Collie (15:28): Do we make things other than ink? Justin Mannhardt (15:30): No, that's incorporated. Rob Collie (15:32): Oh, okay. Justin Mannhardt (15:32): We just make things. Rob Collie (15:34): Can't help it. Can we be We Manufacture Things Ink, Inc.? Justin Mannhardt (15:38): Sure. Rob Collie (15:39): All right. But anyway, we manufacture things. Justin Mannhardt (15:41): There you go. We've got a sales team and they're using a CRM system, such as Salesforce, or HubSpot, or whatever. They're out there, they're doing quotes, they're tracking opportunities, and eventually someone says, "Yeah, I'd love to buy a palette of ink," or whatever. Our company, we're not using the CRM to deal with the production and fulfillment of that order. Okay, so now there's this process where my order form, let's not use any paper in this example, it's still digital but it lands as a PDF form in someone's email inbox that says, "Hey, Customer Service Rep, here's an order." Oh, okay. Now I'm keying said order into our production system that says, "Go manufacture this thing." Now we need to ship the thing out somewhere, and now we're in our logistics system. (16:33): There's all these little hops between systems. Which technology has become more open, and sure there's things like APIs and code based ways to integrate them, but that's not in range for a lot of companies. That's an example of where you could stitch in these little Power Platform type solutions to just, "Hey, let's map the relevant fields and information from the CRM into the order management system." If there's some blanks that need to get filled in, that's okay. Maybe I'm just starting from a queue of new orders right in the system, and I'm maybe adding three or four pieces to that puzzle instead of all of it. Rob Collie (17:12): Okay. I want to make a global note here. Note that we're talking about this broad topic, digital transformation. We're already way down into very detailed, specific use cases. In my opinion, that's what digital transformation is, it's a collection of all of these individual use cases where things can get faster, more efficient, more accurate. It is the sum of many small things. Each one of them might have tremendous impact. This is the way. (17:46): In this particular example, I've been describing the Power Platform as the world's best middleware for a while now. Even Power BI is middleware. It's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful capability is that it can simultaneously ingest data from multiple different line-of-business silos that have never once talked to each other. The only place that they meet is in a Power BI semantic model. Justin Mannhardt (18:10): Yeah. Rob Collie (18:10): And they play a symphony together that Power BI makes them play. They still have never seen each other, but Power BI is what bridges the gap. Now, Power BI is read-only by itself, it doesn't make... /episode/index/show/rawdatabyp3/id/30546098

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Reevaluating the Role of Industry Expertise: Tradeoffs Between Specialization and Adaptation 03/05/2024

A Lesson in Recent History Cures Today's AI Uncertainty 02/27/2024

A Lesson in Recent History Cures Today's AI Uncertainty Welcome to this week’s edition of Raw Data, where we're diving into a timely discussion on the evolution of AI and its comparison with revolutionary technologies of the past, like Power BI. This episode features host Rob Collie and co-host Justin Mannhardt engaging in a deep dive into the hype cycles that have surrounded transformative tech over the years. Drawing on Rob’s rich experience, we take a step back in time to explore the transformative journey of Power BI, a tool that redefined the landscape of business intelligence by making sophisticated analytics accessible, swift, and economical. This story of innovation and foresight is juxtaposed with the current state of AI— a field bustling with potential yet shrouded in a mix of anticipation and ambiguity for many businesses. In this episode, Rob and Justin dissect the realities behind the AI hype, urging a pragmatic approach towards technological adoption. They highlight the importance of mastering existing analytics tools like Power BI, which many organizations have yet to fully leverage, before being swept up in the whirlwind of AI enthusiasm. This practical perspective is essential for businesses aiming to make meaningful advancements in their digital transformation journey. As we navigate these discussions, the episode serves as a beacon for those looking to understand the true impact of AI in the context of proven technologies. It's a call to action for focusing on tangible business problems, employing a strategy that prioritizes impactful solutions over the allure of the latest tech trend. If you're excited by the intersection of AI, analytics, and business strategy, you can’t miss this episode. And as always, if you enjoyed this episode leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps shape our content and reach more listeners. Additionally, for those eager to dive deeper and share your thoughts, we invite you to join our . Your insights and suggestions are what shape our journey forward, illuminating paths to future episodes and discussions. Want to know more about Fabric and AI? /episode/index/show/rawdatabyp3/id/30129458